Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos 0567699099, 9780567699091

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Priests of Creation

Priests of Creation John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos

Edited by John Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © John Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis, 2021 John Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Ravi Pinisetti/Unsplash All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chryssavgis, John, editor. | Asproulis, Nikolaos, 1975- editor. Title: Priests of creation: John Zizioulas on discerning an ecological ethos / edited by John Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis. Description: London; New York : T&T Clark, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020047652 (print) | LCCN 2020047653 (ebook) | ISBN 9780567699091 (paperback) | ISBN 9780567699107 (hardback) | ISBN 9780567699121 (epub) | ISBN 9780567699114 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Orthodox Eastern Church–Doctrines. | Zizioulas, Jean, 1931- | Ecology–Religious aspects–Orthodox Eastern Church. | Nature–Religious aspects–Orthodox Eastern Church. | Creation. | Human ecology–Religious aspects–Orthodox Eastern Church. Classification: LCC BX323 .P75 2021 (print) | LCC BX323 (ebook) | DDC 261.8/8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047652 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047653 ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-9910-7 PB: 978-0-5676-9909-1 ePDF: 978-0-5676-9911-4 ePUB: 978-0-5676-9912-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Foreword  vii

Introduction: Toward an Ecological Ethos  1

I Historical Roots  19 1 St. Paul and the Ecological Problem  21 2 The Book of Revelation and the Natural Environment  31 3 Creation Theology: An Orthodox Perspective  38

II Theological Approaches  53 4 Orthodoxy and the Ecological Crisis  55 5 A Theological Approach to the Ecological Problem  61 6 An Orthodox Response to the Environmental Challenge  73

III Liturgical Perspectives  91 7 Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology  93

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CONTENTS

8 The Eucharistic Vision of the World  133 9 Proprietors or Priests of Creation?  144

IV Ecological Ethics or Ecological Ethos?  155 10 Ethics or Ethos? A Brief Sketch  157 11 Toward an Environmental Ethic  160

V Scientific and Spiritual Dimensions  173 12 Religion and Science: A Theological Approach  175 13 Humanity and Nature: Learning from the Indigenous  186 14 Man and Animals  197

VI Ecumenical and Cultural Implications  203 15 Ecological Asceticism: A Cultural Revolution  205 16 Communion and Communication  210 17 Pope Francis and Laudato Si’  214 Conclusion: From Here to Where?  221 Original Publications  228 Select Bibliography  231 Index of Names  233 Index of Terms  235

FOREWORD

It becomes more and more clear that the ecological crisis which faces the human family cannot be adequately understood, let alone responded to, as a purely “managerial” set of problems. The roots of the crisis lie in a dysfunctional spirituality, and no merely technical solution will do: the survival of our ecosystem requires a spiritual revolution. The survival of the material world made by God—including our own material humanity—depends on our spiritual renewal, and the spiritual revolution is inseparable from a rediscovery of our material reality. For this to be possible, we need a coherent theology of our human position in the world. For centuries, at least since the beginnings of the dramatic expansion of the natural sciences in the seventeenth century, the working assumption of European modernity has been a grimly distorted version of theological convictions about our human vocation and our human uniqueness. We have absorbed the myth that humans are essentially agents defined by instrumental reason—and thus defined by problem-solving for the sake of their own survival: the material stuff of our environment has been seen as entirely subordinate to this model of the priority of the human agent as technical manager. The traditional and biblical understanding of the human person as made in the divine image, and thus made in order freely and lovingly to serve the well-being and balance of the whole created order, has been overlaid by a false spiritualism allied with a Promethean ambition for total control over the material world. Unsurprisingly, Judeo-Christian faith itself has been blamed by some for the devastation of our environment. Yet it is precisely this tradition that gives us some of the most deeply rooted resources for combating the lethal myths that imprison us. In recent decades, His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has been an eminent Christian pioneer in the recovery of a richer and more faithful theology of human calling

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and human dignity—a recovery now also endorsed eloquently in the Encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’. And the Patriarch’s theological vision has been developed in concert with one of the most creative theological minds of our age, Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon. Metropolitan John’s writings on Trinitarian theology, on Church and Eucharist, and above all on the relational character of all finite being as the free creation of an infinite agency that is itself irreducibly relational, have been formative for Christian thinkers of all confessions and backgrounds. It is a great gift to have his reflections specifically on the question of our theological response to ecological crisis gathered together. Here we have just the coherent and comprehensive theological resource that we need for “spiritual revolution”—an impressively wide-ranging vision of what human freedom means in a fragile material universe. The very fact of creation means that our world is vulnerable to disintegration (to what the New Testament and the Fathers knew as phthora, “corruption”). The finite universe always stands “over” nothingness, held in life solely by God’s free gift and not resting on any intrinsic quality of its own, and this means that created freedom exists—in the image of uncreated freedom—in order to serve and conserve the mutuality and reciprocal life-sharing of finite beings, the fruitful balance of all things as they reflect the harmony and abundance of eternal wisdom. The tragedy of our created freedom is in our turning away from this vocation to conserve the flow of gift within the created order to the distorted obsession with preserving our own privilege and security at the expense of all others, human and nonhuman. Christ’s work restores to us that lost place of service— the priestly place we were created to occupy. And the Eucharist in which Christ’s body draws into itself the material life of the world around so that it is, by the spirit’s power, transformed into a gift both to God and from God is the supreme embodiment of the renewal of our humanity and our whole world that Christ’s life, death, and resurrection accomplish. This is the vision which Metropolitan John outlines, with both passion and subtlety. In these pages, as in everything he has written, we find a profound challenge to reimagine our humanity in the living presence of the Triune God and to open ourselves afresh to the transformation offered and promised by the grace of Christ and the

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act of the spirit. For anyone looking for a fully and unapologetically Christian manifesto for the spiritual revolution we so urgently need, these pages will be more than welcome. Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury (2002–2012) Master of Magdalene College (2013–2020)



Introduction Toward an Ecological Ethos

Part A: An Ecological Legacy John Chryssavgis John Zizioulas is arguably one of the most influential,1 if sometimes contentious, theologians of our time, having served as professor of systematic theology at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, London’s Kings College and Rome’s Gregorian, as well as Thessalonika. As Metropolitan John of Pergamon, he has proven one of the most formative, even decisive, bishops of the Orthodox Church, having chaired historical and challenging delegations of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. His writing and ministry have extended across a broad range of academic and ecumenical concerns, leaving a lasting legacy on philosophical and religious thought. Born in 1931, Zizioulas studied at the Universities of Athens and Thessalonika, while also attending Bossey Ecumenical Institute and Harvard university, where he encountered the late Fr. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979). Scholars may argue that the root of this influence lies in his Greek doctoral dissertation on the Eucharist and the bishop in the early Church (Athens, 1965)2 or the seminal publication in English

Yves Congar, “Bulletin d’ ecclésiologie,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 1982, no. 66 (1982): 88. 2 English translation by Elizabeth Theokritoff, Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop during the First Three Centuries (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001). 1

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of his essays on personhood and communion (New York, 1985); critics may contend that the challenge of his argument lies in his reading of Greek philosophy and even his interpretation of the Greek patristics or his sensitivity and conversation with diverse currents of contemporary thought and culture. Yet, there is no doubt that the core of his philosophical and theological thesis— deeply rooted in the classical thought of the Cappadocian Fathers and their understanding of God as Trinity as the foundation of life in the Church and the world—is the conviction of the human person as relational and communal,3 called and destined to serve within creation as a microcosm and mediator.4 This worldview will subsequently lead Metropolitan John to a conception of humankind as “the priest of creation.”5 In this way, humanity bears the distinctive responsibility—not only beyond conservation or preservation but also beyond management or stewardship—of relating to creation in an existential and essential manner, rather than a purely functional or moral way. The worldview of John Zizioulas is also markedly shaped by the dynamics of ecumenical discussions within the World Council of Churches, particularly the Faith and Order Commission of the 1960s and 1970s, with which he was deeply involved, as well as through bilateral dialogues in the 1980s and 1990s, until very recently, when he cochaired the international theological commissions for Anglican-Orthodox dialogue and OrthodoxRoman Catholic dialogue, where he sealed his reputation as a remarkable spokesman and eminent apologist of the Orthodox Church. Metropolitan John goes to great lengths to apply his ecclesiology to the reality of the Church. While “some Eastern churches are wary of Western ‘influence’ and critical of those involved in such ecumenism . . . [H]e believes all ecumenical efforts are mutually

See John Zizioulas, “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood,” Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (1975): 407–8. 4 The terminology belongs to Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century. See Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, ed. A. M. Allchin (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1995), 137–40. 5 John Zizioulas, “Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology,” King’s Theological Review 12 (1989); also in John Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Douglas H. Knight and trans. Katerina Nikolopulu (New York and London: T&T Clark, 2009). See Chapter 6. 3

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enriching.”6 Nevertheless, his writing manifests “a striking absence of denominational arrogance and contemptuous simplifications.”7 Zizioulas is not content to remain in the ivory tower of academia or the moribund institution of the Church. He demonstrates a discerning vulnerability before the burning issues that confront the modern world and personal commitment to the ecological crisis, which provides an element of timeliness and urgency to his theological worldview. Metropolitan John has been a pioneer thinker and primary spokesman for the ecological initiatives of the Ecumenical Patriarchate from the late 1980s, chairing the innovative Religious and Scientific Committee established by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in 1994 to promote and enable interdisciplinary and interreligious conversation and convergence on the global issue of environmental degradation, while exploring the broader implication and application of a compassionate and reconciliatory vision for all of God’s creation. He avoids conventional temptations inherent to the Orthodox Church, including the seductive dream of anachronism, isolationism, and nationalism. His universal vision of the Church’s mission, realized in the sacrament of the Eucharist, is based in an eschatological perspective of creation.8 No matter how tradition understands theology and theologizing, it is never as abstract theory or metaphysical speculation but always as an event of the Church and encounter with the world. This is why he feels secure before any creative tensions within the tradition. To quote Colin Gunton: “The greatness of John Zizioulas . . . is shown by the very tensions in his work, by the fact that he allows the weaknesses of the tradition to come into view while operating in faithfulness to it.”9 Indeed, his determination is to hold together—even harmonize— tensions between heaven and earth which involves a commensurate

Douglas Knight, “Introduction,” to John Zizioulas: Lectures in Christian Dogmatics (London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2009), xxii–xxiii. 7 Lars Erik Rikheim, “Johannes Zizioulas,” in Key Theological Thinkers: From Modern to Postmodern, eds. Staale Johannes Kristiansen and Svein Rise (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 435–47 [Here at 435]. 8 See John D. Zizioulas, The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. Luke Ben Tallon (Edinburgh and London: T&T Clark, 2011). 9 Colin Gunton, “Persons and Particularity,” in Douglas Knight (ed.), The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 107. 6

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willingness to welcome and transform the entire community, the whole Church, and all of creation. True to a disciplined and critical intellect, Zizioulas is always wary of dichotomy and always welcoming of dialogue, ever prepared to give credit where it is merited and criticism where it is warranted. In an interview for The Tablet, he remarked: “We must be honest: the Church is not always faithful to herself, and as a result official churches are governed by a totalitarian point of view, a doctrinaire and moralistic spirit” (August 25, 2007). Not only does he struggle to reconcile inconsistencies, but he also challenges prevailing assumptions about the relationship between God and world. In so doing, he initiates and invites a rediscovery of Christianity in its richest traditional form, converting even the most conservative exegesis of the relationship between Creator and creation into a creative and constructive relationship. Whether dealing with a theological synthesis (where the relationship of the Trinity assumes central stage), ecclesiological (where the concept of communion becomes the basis of existence), or the ecological crisis (where the mystery of the Eucharist reflects the offering of creation to its Creator), Metropolitan John constantly searches for points of conversation and convergence, rather than conformation or condemnation. The intimate and inseparable connection between communion and creation, or Eucharist and ecology, issues in an incontrovertible affirmation of the material or created cosmos, where nothing whatsoever is neutral or unsacred and where everything is a sacred gift of divine love. The present world is neither denied nor denigrated in favor of the heavenly kingdom. The human person is called to return the dust of the ground in an act of priestly offering and not a proprietary possession, neither denouncing nor destroying creation but rather transforming it in an act of thanksgiving and glorification to its Creator. The Eucharist, then, makes sense of God as Trinity; the Eucharist constitutes the very essence of the Church as communion; and the Eucharist expresses the vocation of humanity in the created order. This means that, to put it plainly and bluntly, Metropolitan John is undaunted before the complexities of the world, unafraid to “get his hands dirty” in the quandaries of life. He seeks—indeed, agonizes—to relate theology to ecology: to the suffering of the world, the pollution of nature, and the destruction of biodiversity.

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He discerns the imperative nature of a positive exchange and productive debate between religion and science in the face of consternation and censure by political conservatives, especially in the United States, where paranoia dismisses environmentalism, classifying it alongside other “modern evils” such as liberalism and communism!10 However, there can be no doubt that not only have the poor been excluded from the benefits of human development and progress, but today they are obliged to face the devastating and destructive consequences created by climate change. In 2002, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope John Paul II signed the Venice Declaration, a joint statement in which the two leaders declared their concern for the protection of the planet from the threat posed by the ecological crisis. A similar paragraph was included in the Common Declaration signed by Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Jerusalem in 2014. The most striking example of such ecumenical leadership and collaboration came in 2017, when Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew together issued a bilateral document on the occasion of September 1, the day of prayer for the protection of the environment. Although these gestures may be perceived as a simple formality, their symbolic meaning is of immense importance. For, while the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches have engaged for the last fifty years in an official theological dialogue since 1980—with the express purpose of resolving entrenched doctrinal problems that have divided and isolated them for the last thousand years— theological rapprochement cannot take place in a historical vacuum. The two “sister Churches” are called to seek unity not only with past experiences but also with present conditions, taking into account the actual needs of humanity and the world today. This is what, in an interview for Cività Cattolica entitled “Cosmic Liturgy and Ecology” (July 25, 2015), Metropolitan John likes to call “an existential ecumenism,” which addresses the challenge of social justice and climate change. Zizioulas himself is informed about as well as in tune with current theological and sociopolitical issues—

See M. Butler and A. Morriss, Creation and the Heart of Man: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on Environmentalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute, 2013), 5. 10

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perhaps a civic dimension of his understanding about “otherness” as openness and communion. It therefore came as no surprise that, when the Ecumenical Patriarchate established September 1 as the annual day of prayer for the protection and preservation of the natural environment, issuing its initial Encyclical in 1989, Metropolitan John played a prominent role. In the previous year, he had represented then Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios as keynote speaker at an environmental conference held on the island of Patmos on the occasion of the 900th anniversary since the foundation of the Monastery of St. John the Evangelist. Thus, long before most political authorities and environmental activists had awakened to the urgency of creation care, and more than twentyfive years prior to the publication of Laudato Si’ by Pope Francis, Metropolitan John proposed the leadership role of the Orthodox Church in responding to climate change as the most vital existential challenge of modern man. Nor was it again entirely surprising that he was invited to present the Pope’s Ecological encyclical at the Vatican on June 18, 2015, alongside Peter Cardinal Turkson, then president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace—the first time a papal document had been jointly launched with an Orthodox prelate. What is, in fact, genuinely surprising is the ostensible absence of any place for ecology in the manuals and seminaries of theology for many centuries. What is unfortunately surprising was the stark disengagement and disconnection between the biblical doctrine of creation and the contemporary challenge of climate change. What became clear to Metropolitan John was that the relationship between humankind and the earth was largely ignored by Christian teaching and preaching to the point that American historian Lynn White Jr. would accuse Christianity of being responsible for the modern ecological crisis.11 Metropolitan John recognized that human beings have long been exalted above the rest of creation in a disproportionate and unbalanced way, thereby granting themselves the license to abuse and exploit the resources of nature, sometimes even on the pretext of scripture itself (Gen. 1:28). Metropolitan John is convinced that the relationship between theology and ecology—as between religion and science—in fact

See Lynn Townsend White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–7. 11

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runs very deep. For, while it may be true that the ecological crisis has its historical roots historically, to a greater or lesser degree, in theological ideas particularly prevalent in the West, it is at the same time the mandate of theology to advance a balanced biblical worldview that stresses the sanctity and value of all creation, including trees and animals, which humans must respect and treat as a divine gift of the creator and ruler of all creation. Metropolitan John is undeterred by the possibility that a potential anthropomonism or anthropocentrism is a misinterpretation and misuse of the biblical doctrine of creation, but especially a compromise and contradiction of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. The former pronounced that God created all things “very good” (Gen. 1:31), while the latter proclaimed that Christ came to save the whole creation (Rom. 8:23). Moreover, Metropolitan John is convinced that this understanding of the function and vocation of humanity in creation is common to the Christian tradition of the East and West alike, while providing the basis for a Christian ecological ethos. In this respect, a sound appreciation and profound attitude with regard to creation result less from a conceptual sense of human morality as from a compelling sensitivity toward human mortality. The “existential” or “personal” dimension of creation and Incarnation by a loving God is integrally and inseparably linked with creation “out of nothing” (ex nihilo), a doctrine that for Metropolitan John safeguards the transcendence of God and supports the existential trajectory of the world. In brief, as he writes, “it is imperative to be able to refer to God without implicitly or explicitly referring at the same time to the world.”12 Indeed, for Zizioulas, God is defined by divine transcendence and divine immanence, by divine independence as well as by a relationship of communion with creation. This is what simultaneously preserves the freedom of the Creator and protects the sacredness of creation even while the former is eternal and the latter mortal: “If [creation] was eternal it would not need to be created. If it were not created

John Zizioulas, “The Doctrine of God the Trinity Today: Suggestions for an Ecumenical Study,” in The Forgotten Trinity, ed. Alasdair Heron (London: British Council of Churches, 1989), 23–4. 12

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from nothing, this would mean that it was created from something that had some other existence.”13 For Metropolitan John, the significance and implication of all this is the conviction that the ecological crisis is essentially a spiritual problem. The fissure in humanity’s covenant with God resulted in a rupture in the relationship between Creator and creation. Therefore, in its teaching about sin, the Church must introduce a new environmental dimension, namely ecological sin. Furthermore, repentance must be expanded and extended to include the damage wrought by human beings—both as individuals and as communities— on the natural environment. Ecological sin is wrongdoing against other human beings and future generations. At the same time, the ecological crisis goes hand in hand with social injustice. This calls for what Metropolitan John describes as “an ecological asceticism,” echoing the great mystics and contemplatives that experienced a sensitivity and subtlety with all creation. Humble asceticism is an antidote to human arrogance with respect to the rest of creation, a conceited disposition that Metropolitan John attributes largely to the age of Enlightenment and technological revolution. In this regard, asceticism is conceived as leading a life of coexistence with all creatures, great and small, as well as sharing in the suffering of all creatures, human and nonhuman. There is an organic unity and radical affinity—a common origin and universal destiny—that characterizes all of God’s creation. An ethos of asceticism—a culture and conduct of frugality and simplicity—is an effective reduction and correction to our contemporary lifestyle of consumption, shattering any marginalization of theology from life and the world.

Part B: A Green Theology Nikolaos Asproulis Long before the Paris Agreement and the Encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ in 2015, and in the context of the established designation John Zizioulas, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2008), 88. 13

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of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as the “Green Patriarch” due to his global ecological initiatives, Christian churches and religious thinkers began to reflect seriously on the environmental crisis and the attending urgent problems for people throughout the world. John D. Zizioulas14 (Metropolitan of Pergamon) a wellknown spokesman of contemporary Orthodoxy in general and the Ecumenical Patriarchate in particular, whose work is inspired by the Greek Fathers and by the existential language of modern philosophy, has sparked an animated debate in ecumenical systematic theology and its focus on the importance of environmental care as early as 1967, by promoting a “Eucharistic vision of the world.”15 His thought, often expressed in ontological and Eucharistic terms, sought to increase the awareness of the Orthodox churches on the present ecological problem, insisting on the need to promote a new ecological ethics that would effectively respond to this crisis.

Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis As a competent anatomist of the history of ideas, Zizioulas deliberately turns his attention to the roots of the ecological crisis. Inasmuch as the apostolic and patristic era were not preoccupied with the issue, one is obliged to search for its “ideological roots . . . in the medieval theology and philosophy of the West,” which was further shaped predominantly by the European Enlightenment.16 In this regard, he repeatedly refers to major thinkers of the Enlightenment such as Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, and particularly René Descartes17 as those who gradually formed a worldview presenting the human being as dominating nature, an attitude further facilitated by the increasing prevalence of technology and science. Based mainly on the well-known article by Lynn White Jr.,18 Zizioulas credits certain For a comprehensive overall discussion of his theology see D. Knight, ed., The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007); and P. Kalaitzidis and N. Asproulis, eds., Personhood, Eucharist and the Kingdom of God in Orthodox and Ecumenical Perspective. Festschrift in Honour of Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon (Volos: Volos Academy Publications, 2016) (in Greek). 15 See Chapter 8. 16 See Chapters 1 and 6. 17 See Chapters 5 and 9. 18 “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” 1203–7. Cf. Chapters 5–7. 14

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currents in the history of the Church as leading to the modern indifference or abuse of creation. Thus he points out the bold rationalistic perception of the imago Dei in Christian theology, which gave almost ontological priority to reason/intellect over the body/matter,19 a mentality which undervalued the materiality of creation and gradually contributed to a clear anti-ecological orientation. This understanding was evident in both Western and Eastern theology. For instance, Origen understood the human mind as the very link between God and creation, an attitude that undervalued the dignity of creation.20 In this vein, Descartes’s “cogito ergo sum”21 was the natural consequence, whereby nature and creation were perceived as a means toward an individualist goal, the unquenchable pleasure (eudemonism) of human beings. At the same time, due to certain Platonist and Neoplatonist influences, a whole spiritual tradition starting again with Origen and moving through Evagrius, the monastic tradition and the Philokalia spirituality led to a certain dichotomy between body and soul, to a devaluation of the material aspect of humankind and by extension of creation in favor of the “immortality of the soul” and the spiritual world.22 A similar tendency also appeared in the West, where Augustine perceived “the Kingdom of God [as] a place where only human souls would exist.”23 As a result, a certain escapist tendency from history, materiality, and its problems dominated in the history of Christianity and even Eastern Orthodoxy, a stance evident in the reluctance of the latter to deal with issues related to the so-called political theology.24

See Chapters 7 and 9. See Chapter 3. 21 Cf. Chapters 4–6. 22 See Chapter 3. Zizioulas states that, for Origen, “the material creation was the outcome of the fall, and that it is the spiritual world which will finally survive.” See also Chapter 6. 23 See Chapters 3, 5, and 7. 24 In Chapter 8, for instance, Zizioulas expresses his disagreement with any view that considers the Gospel as a sort of “opium.” For him, “waiting for the terrestrial paradise of a morally perfect society is a creation of Western rationalism that cannot be deduced from the witness of the Eucharist.” This does not mean that his theological vision does not lead to a certain political action, though this is not his primarily concern. His eco-theology is a clear example of the political orientation of his theology. 19 20

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The Doctrine of Creatio Ex Nihilo What then are the basic principles of Zizioulas’s eco-theology? Following the late Georges Florovsky, Zizioulas boldly examines the origins of creation (κτίσις) from the standpoint of the absolute dialectic between uncreated and created, along with a radical understanding of “nothing” (nihil), emphasizing the freedom of God as the ultimate cause of creation which ensures an ontological dualism. Moreover, he stresses the role that human beings can play in relation to the salvation of creation, taking into serious consideration man’s position as “microcosm” (Maximus the Confessor) as well as his accountability and liturgical vocation as “priest of creation.” Zizioulas dedicates a considerable time to this thorny issue.25 Like Florovsky previously, he identifies the question of self-referentiality of being as the core challenge of Greek thought addressed by the Church Fathers. Hence, in Aristotle, priority is given to the unity of beings, to the “One” over the “many,” insofar as “nothing comes from nothing.”26 As Zizioulas puts it: “If the beginning [of creation] was nothing, it would return by necessity to nothing, whereas if its beginning was ‘something’ [cf. Timaeus], it would return by necessity to that ‘something’ from which it came forth. Being would then have to be cyclical if it were to survive, as was in fact conceived by the ancient Greeks.”27 That said, Zizioulas adamantly highlights the major problem underlying any creation theology with a direct impact on the present debates about the sustainability of creation itself. In this regard he points out the novelty of the Christian vision against the various prevailing theories in the early patristic era. On the one side Gnosticism28 held that the world is “penetrated by evil.”29 In this case, an escapist attitude from this “evil” world In his seminal articles “Created and Uncreated. The Existential Significance of Chalcedonian Christology,” in Communion and Otherness, ed. Paul McPartlan. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2006), 250–85; “Preserving God’s Creation,” 1–5, 41–45, 13 (1990): 1–5 (reprinted here in Chapter 7), but also his celebrated books Being as Communion (Chapter 1) and Communion & Otherness (Chapters 1 and 6). Cf. also his The Eucharistic Communion and the World and Chapter 3 here. 26 Aristotle, Phys. 191Α, 23 (cited in “On Being Other,” Communion & Otherness, 15, n.3). 27 “On Being Other,” 19. 28 Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 83. See Chapter 4. 29 “Preserving God’s Creation,” 155. See Chapter 7. 25

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was boldly considered a necessary condition for salvation. On the other side the Platonist view (along with mainstream classical tradition),30 according to which the created world is penetrated by divine presence, sustained the inherent concept in various ecoactivist trends of creation as self-sufficient. In the words of an ancient saying: “Everything is filled with gods,”31 which implied a clear “ontological affinity”32 between God and creation. While the concept of a created world is highlighted perhaps for the first time in Plato’s Demiurge, his account of God refers to a decorator and not a creator ex nihilo in an absolute sense. For Zizioulas, this “Demiurge had to create out of pre-existing matter and to do so with absolute respect for the ideas of Beauty and Goodness.”33 The most basic question ultimately revolves around the proper understanding of the concept of creation itself, which must be examined dialectically along with its beginning/origin. For Zizioulas, the fact that the world had a beginning in an absolute sense seemed to “be utter nonsense and absurdity to all ancient Greek thinkers.”34 Again following Florovsky, he credits Athanasius for highlighting that “between God and the world there is total ontological otherness.”35 Nevertheless, a Christian view of creation requires a literal understanding of the beginning of created existence, as well as of the un-originate (ἀγέννητος) existence of the Creator. Christian theology was thus forced to innovate. “Creation as ktisis is a notion encountered for the first time . . . with the Apostle Paul, and it clearly presupposes an absolutely ontological beginning.”36 Zizioulas further stresses the relevance of this term by speaking of the need to introduce the concept “ktisiology” into Christian vocabulary. By using the term “ktisis” rather than demiourgia, Zizioulas emphasizes the ontologically absolute character of the beginning of creation, which the Church Fathers ontologically interpreted as creation “from (absolute) nothing.”37

Ibid., 156. Ibid. 32 Cf. Chapters 3 and 7. 33 “On Being Other,” 16. 34 “Preserving God’s Creation,” 157. Cf. Chapter 7. 35 “On Being Other,” 17, quoting Athanasius, Contra Arian. 1.20–2 1 (PG 26: 53). 36 “Created and Uncreated,” 253. See also Chapters 1 and 7. 37 Cf. Chapter 7. 30 31

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As he explains: “The idea that the world has an absolute beginning could only be expressed through the formula that the world was created ‘out of nothing,’ ex nihilo.”38 Since the time of the early Church (Athanasius and Nicaea I), an awareness gradually developed that between God and world “there exists an absolute, ‘abysmal’ otherness.”39 Zizioulas contends that if it were possible for something to arise from nothing,40 then it was also possible that a totally other being could exist vis-á-vis God’s being. Thus, he notes, “the doctrine of creation out of nothing was about otherness and freedom in ontology.”41 In so doing, Zizioulas deepens his creation theology, since this view of creatio ex nihilo also defines the parameters for the dialectic between created and uncreated, which required an understanding of the God-world relationship as one of reciprocal poles in a relationship of absolute otherness, and the existence of a third pole of absolute nothingness to which the other two should point. In this context, absolute nothingness signifies the lack of any metaphysical kinship (syggenia) between God and creation at the level of existence. As he puts it: If god and the world were to confront one another for a moment and their relationship was to be turned into what we call a dialectic, it follows, in the spirit of ancient Greece, that the universe would collapse. Antitheses can certainly be used . . . but on condition that the antitheses are not ontologically absolute and that they do not give “space” or “time” to absolute nonbeing. Hence, ascent and descent are the terms of an opposition . . . emphasizing their unity . . . There is no dialectical relationship, in an absolutely ontological sense. There is a mutual dependence.42 By emphasizing creatio ex nihilo as the very foundation of any eco-theology, Zizioulas concludes that the world is not eternal. If the world was eternal it would not need to be created, and if it was not created from nothing, then the world was created from “Preserving God’s Creation,” 158. See Chapter 7. For a detailed account of the importance of nihil see also “Created and Uncreated,” 273–5. 39 “On Being Other,” 19. 40 “Preserving God’s Creation,” 158–9. Cf. Chapter 7. 41 “On Being Other,” 18. 42 “Created and Uncreated,” 252–3. 38

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something that has some other existence. This is clearly a reversal of the ancient view and leads to the conclusion that “existence is the fruit of freedom,”43 since the self-referentiality of being, as perceived in ancient thought, is now abolished. For Zizioulas the doctrine of creation out of nothing has clear ecological implications: “The world does not belong to us and we are not ‘inhabitants and masters’ of nature . . . but rather ‘stewards and managers.’”44 As soon as the world is considered a gift offered by God, then any sort of dualism that undermines the dignity of the world’s materiality is excluded. The fact that the world was created out nothing and is not eternal means that there is also the possibility that it would return to nothing and cannot live eternally on its own right.45 Zizioulas emphasizes that one negative prospect of the Fall is the ultimate activation of “the limitations and potential dangers inherent in creaturehood, if creation is left to itself,”46 inasmuch as nothingness, ultimately death, continuously permeates and penetrates the world. Zizioulas’s emphasis on “nothing” indicates the abysmal chasm between God and creation, signifying that creation’s very being constitutes a gift from God. If creation is a gift, originated from the absolute and creative will of God, then it by no means possesses any natural or other means to guarantee eternal survival. This is an uncontested reality nowadays, when the environmental crisis threatens the very sustainability and the future of the planet. It is sufficient here to refer to the expanding global warming and the radical consequences of the climate change for biodiversity and the survival of all creatures, including human beings, in order to realize that our world is, today as never before, under the yoke of death.

Survival of the Planet So what should be done? “How did God want the world to survive?”47 For a Christian, this question is not just theoretical but relates to the

Ibid., 255–6. See Chapter 1. 45 Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 89. 46 J. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 102. 47 “Preserving God’s Creation,” 162. See also Chapter 7. 43 44

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core of the Gospel message and the Christian identity. Zizioulas is adamant in describing the various solutions proposed over time. By doing this, he emphasizes the danger of adopting a view of “natural affinity”48 between God and world, a sort of a “metaphysical continuum” (Florovsky), a view that would account to a return to the self-referentiality of being, if we accept that the world has been originally endowed with a natural capacity for survival. This leads, for one thing, to the notion of the “immortality of the soul,”49 which Zizioulas regards as problematic. If anything offers creation the possibility of existing in a natural way, it inevitably also leads to an obligatory immortality. Equally unacceptable is a related proposition based on “moral” or “juridical” foundations,50 supposing that created being can improve itself by practicing or obeying natural or divine law. For Zizioulas, a proposal of this kind cannot overcome death inasmuch as the latter is an ontological problem, and not just a moral one. Given his firm preoccupation with ontology, Zizioulas boldly states: “No, death is not conquered like that. The only thing conquered is preoccupation with the problem of death.”51 How then can creation be saved? To answer this, Zizioulas develops a creative interpretation of Chalcedonian Christology.52 In this vein, one must also take into account the patristic idea of “hypostatic union” which, according to him, gives priority to the person rather than to the two natures of Christ. Interpreting Maximus the Confessor, Zizioulas notes that, in order to overcome death, a relationship is necessary between the created and the uncreated,53 and it is the human being who must undertake this role. However, the Fall foiled this divinely ordained task, necessitating change (not cancelation) of the divine plan. What was required now was for the Logos to become human, “so that all that has been created can be united to the uncreated. For death to be overcome, the created has to come into relationship with the uncreated.”54

Ibid., 163. Cf. also “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity,” Communion & Otherness, 227. 49 Ibid., 161, “Created and Uncreated,” 258. 50 “Created and Uncreated,” 258. 51 Ibid. 52 See his “Created and Uncreated.” 53 Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 102. 54 Ibid. 48

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The Fall changed the natural condition of “difference” (διαφορά) between created and uncreated into one of “division” (διαίρεση) (according to Maximus),55 leading again to the nonexistence that preceded creation. In this context, Zizioulas proposes an existential interpretation of the Chalcedonian Definition, and particularly of the clause56 “without confusion” (ἀσυγχύτως) and “without division” (ἀδιαιρέτως), describing the relationship between God and humanity in the person of Christ. “Without division” highlights the necessity of no separation between created and uncreated; on the contrary, there must be also real communion at the ontological level in order to avoid both the self-referentiality of the creation and death. “Without confusion” guarantees the freedom and otherness of the two realities; otherwise, the relationship would not be free. The two concepts are mediated in the person of Christ, in whom communion and otherness coincide. Christ’s resurrection offers the whole of creation a victory over death and salvation. Once again following Maximus, Zizioulas notes that without the Incarnation of the Logos,57 the ontological distance between God and world cannot be overcome.58 Christ can thus be understood as the human being par excellence, who brings God and world into relationship. Is the person of Christ then the vantage point from which every aspect of creation is to be considered (the act of creation and the salvation of the ktisis)? A study of Zizioulas’s early work reveals an attempt to directly connect the divine Logos with the beginning of creation in an ontological perspective. Christ “is the ‘beginning [ἀρχή]’ of the world (ontological, cosmological Christology) because He is also the beginning [ἀρχή] of the world to come (eschatological Christology).”59

The Priest of Creation Patristic tradition therefore envisions man as the link between God and creation. It was Irenaeus of Lyons who described the human “On Being Other,” 22. Cf. “Created and Uncreated.” 57 “On Being Other,” 21ff. 58 “On Being Other,” 23–5. 59 J. Zizioulas, Ellinismos kai Christianismos: I synantisi dyo kosmon (Athens: Apostoliki Diakonia, 2003), 115. 55 56

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being as “the glory of God.”60 Against the prevailing understanding of the imago Dei as chiefly referring to the human mind, the Greek Fathers of both East and West represent a different perception in light of freedom,61 according to which the latter should not be considered as a psychological or moral decision but as “the ability to affirm or deny the very existence of something involving one’s own existence. In other words, the human being is endowed with the freedom to either destroy creation or affirm its existence.”62 The current ecological crisis clearly highlights the relevance of such an understanding of human freedom, found in the Greek Fathers. To be clear, Zizioulas credits Darwinism63 and modern quantum physics64 for highlighting the inherent interconnection between humanity and the rest of creation. The human being is just an animal, albeit an “autexousion animal” “with a difference of degree, but not of kind.” It is due to the freedom bestowed to humanity that man possesses the capacity to “transcend the limitations of nature to the point of denying nature itself or anything given.”65 It is exactly here that man’s role as the priest of creation emerges. Creation in itself, devoid of any natural means of salvation, needs man as a priest to “freely unify it and refer it back to its Creator.” It is in the Eucharist that humanity undertakes this priestly role66 acting in the place of God Himself (“εἰς τόπον Θεοῦ, according to Ignatius of Antioch),67 by offering the creation in its entirety to God the Father, so as to gain eternal life. In this vein, man becomes the “priest of creation,”68 the one called to treat the world not only with respect but also “with creativity so that its parts may form a whole and this whole may transcend its boundaries by being brought into relation with God.”69 This renders the human being indispensable for creation in

See Chapters 3, 7. Cf. Chapter 10. 62 See Chapter 3. 63 See, for instance, Chapters 6 and 9. 64 He repeatedly refers to the well-known “Anthropic Cosmological Principle” to describe the close ties between humanity and the world (see, for instance, Chapter 5). 65 See Chapters 3, 9. 66 Cf. Chapter 7 (lecture III). 67 Magn., PG 5, 668A. 68 See Chapter 9. 69 See Chapter 3. 60 61

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contrast with certain modern ecological views that devaluate man’s role in saving nature.

Closing Remarks Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) affirms his “firm conviction that the solution of the ecological problem is not simply a matter of management and technicalities, important as these may be. It is a matter of changing our spiritual attitudes, indeed of changing our very worldview.”70 Today, it is not enough for humanity simply to preserve, as a steward or oikonomos of the environment.71 Man is called to act as priest of creation, as homo eucharisticus, in order to contribute to the eschatological incorruptibility of the God’s creation. At the end of time, we must offer in return the precious gift offered to us by God not as a destroyed planet but as the Eucharistic Gifts of the body of Christ in order to live forever. While “ecology is . . . a matter of our esse,” the offering of creation through humankind to God also makes it a matter of “our bene esse.”72 Even if it sometimes appears too late on this side of history, we confess that the last word always belongs to God.

Op. cit. See Chapter 9. 72 Op. cit. 70 71

I

Historical Roots



1 St. Paul and the Ecological Problem

The Origins of the Ecological Crisis Neither the apostolic period generally nor St. Paul personally directly address the environmental crisis; ecological issues were not a concern of that time. Nor again do we encounter these questions in the patristic age. It would, therefore, be futile to search for references to the ecological crisis in the writings of the New Testament or the teachings of the Church Fathers. It is in our era that ecological concerns emerge for the first time, although their roots must be sought several centuries ago, notably during the period of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course, their ideological roots are also implicit in the medieval theology and philosophy of the West, while they are predominantly shaped by the European Enlightenment, when the advancement of science and technology enables humankind to subdue nature and exploit it for utilitarian purposes. It was precisely then that the first renowned representatives of the Enlightenment, such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant, openly refer to a domination of nature by man, encouraging the enslavement or subjugation of nature to human will and inviting humankind to become, in the expression of Descartes, “the master et possessor of nature” through the use of science. Particular impact along the course toward the present ecological crisis was engendered by the rise of technology, which does not simply subdue nature to humanity; after all, human beings always

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employed nature for purposes of survival without nevertheless interfering in the mechanisms of the natural process. However, technology—which in this sense differs from science or even technical engineering—developed its own mechanisms, whereby it penetrates and interferes with the relationship between matter and energy by isolating and stockpiling resources for purposes other than those intended by nature. In this way, human beings not only constrained nature to provide more than what it was capable of offering, but also compelled it to provide things entirely different from those permitted by the natural laws. The culmination of this mentality arguably lies in the process of genetic mutation. This brutal interference of man into the laws and consequent balances of nature, in combination with the pressure exerted upon nature to produce increasingly more for the satisfaction of human greed, created such an immense disruption for the natural environment that human beings could no longer live in harmony with nature. This is how we arrived at the current ecological crisis, which is unquestionably fatal for both nature and human beings. We no longer need to define this predicament. Instead, we witness and experience it, albeit with a certain delay which, unfortunately, leaves little hope or possibility for any resolution. When the Ecumenical Patriarchate Demetrios launched its ecological initiatives in 1989, no one could as much as suspect the gravity of the situation that would emerge. Today, everyone is talking about the environment; but it is probably too late. It should not surprise us that the ecological crisis is directly related to theology. This relationship is not only of a moral and spiritual nature, related to the voracious greed, selfish love, and self-gratification of our age. There is no doubt that this moral and spiritual dimension is immediately connected to the ecological problem. However, far beyond and more profoundly than this connection, the ecological crisis has to do with people’s faith; it is not a moral, but rather a doctrinal matter. Indeed, this means that it touches upon the way that human beings regard the world and their relationship with nature; in other words, it concerns what human beings believe. This is the precisely point where the teaching of the Apostle Paul assumes particular importance for the ecological problem. There are two fundamental questions that arise in this context. The first is: What do we believe about the world? This question

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addresses the subject of cosmology. The second question is: What do we believe about ourselves? This is a matter that addresses anthropology. These two fundamental issues of faith decisively influence the way that we respond to the ecological problem. And on these two issues, the teaching of the Apostle Paul acquires vital significance. In the pages that follow, we shall briefly refer to this teaching and seek to draw certain conclusions regarding the challenge of the natural environment.

Cosmos as Creation For St. Paul the world is not something self-existent or self-evident. Nor can it be explained with reference to itself. The existence of the world is described as creation; that is, it relates to the creation of a person. As emphasized in the Letter to the Hebrews, “Every house, of course, is built by someone; and God is the one who has built all things” (3:4). Although this letter is not considered as Pauline, it nonetheless reflects and faithfully expresses the spirit of St. Paul. Similarly, in other letters of Paul, the notion that the world is a creation or creature of God is never absent. Thus, in Rom. 1:25, the world is described as “ktisis [creation]” and God as “ktistis [creator].” Referring to the pagans, Paul writes that “they worship and serve what God has created instead of creator,” thereby differentiating the Christian faith about the world from that of idolatry precisely by introducing the distinction later adopted by the Church Fathers between “created” and “uncreated.” Paul will also repeat this idea in other epistles, such as Eph. 3:9, where he describes God as “creator of all things,” as well as Col. 1:15–16, where, in referring to Christ, Paul observes that “Christ is the visible likeness of the invisible God. He is the first-born Son, superior to all created things. For through him God created everything in heaven and in earth, the seen and the unseen things . . . God created all things through him and for him.” Let us leave aside for a moment the Christological aspect of this cosmology, to which we shall return later. At this point, we should note Paul’s insistence on the belief that the world is created. This conviction is of great ecological significance because, if we accept that the world has been granted to us by someone else, this implies that:

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(a) The world does not belong to us and we are not “inhabitants and masters” of nature, as Descartes tells us with regard to the progress of science, but rather “stewards and managers” of a precious property that does not belong to us. We must, therefore, recognize God as the sole proprietor of the natural world and “refer” or “offer” “all things” to Him. At this point, the ecological significance behind the words of the Divine Liturgy—“Your own of your own we offer to you in all and for all”—emerges very clearly. It is no coincidence that the Divine Liturgy is already from the earliest centuries called an “offering.” As we say in liturgy: “Let us present the holy offering in peace.” This word is of enormous ecological importance. For by offering creation to God, humanity becomes conscious of the sacredness of creation, since it recognizes that creation belongs to God. Moreover, just as everything that belongs to God is sacred, so too the natural world that surrounds us is also sacred. Eucharistic theology thus proves to be crucial for ecology. After all, the Eucharist is not just a prayer of gratitude to God, but incorporates the participation of the natural world in the form of the natural elements of bread and wine. By raising bread and wine and exclaiming “Your own of your own,” the priest and the ecclesiastical community over which he presides proclaim in the most festive manner that the material creation belongs to God and, therefore, must be approached with awe and respect for the integrity and way in which it both exists and functions. (b) In this context, the words of St. Paul in his First Letter to 1 Tim. 4:4 also acquires great significance: “Everything that God has created is good . . . to be received with thanks.” This phrase simultaneously declares first of all an emphasis on the natural environment (since “everything is good”), thus excluding any Manichaean perception of the material world and any asceticism that might conceal aversion or rejection of material goods, and secondly it acknowledges that material creation is a gift, which is why it must be received “with thanks.” St. Paul therefore urges the Colossians to be “filled with thanksgiving” (2:7), and the

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Ephesians, “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, always to give thanks for everything to God the Father” (5:20). In this way, everything that occurs in the Divine Eucharist extends to and permeates human life. The Eucharistic ethos resulting from this worldview is the most powerful antidote to the ecological crisis. By promoting this ethos as a consequence to the belief that the world is God’s creation and is therefore neither self-existent nor self-evident, the Apostle Paul becomes especially relevant to the ecological crisis that we face.

Responsibility for Creation According to St. Paul, the human person is divided into flesh, soul, and spirit. These three elements should not to be understood as natural constituents of the human being; instead, they are manifested in the way in which we exist; that is to say, they indicate a relationship and attitude, not the essence of the human person. The term “flesh” implies enslaving nature to the demands of the flesh or the biological hypostasis of humankind. By the same token, the term “soul” indicates someone living according to the laws of mortal or transient life, which is interrupted by death. By contrast, the term “spirit” signifies being filled with the Holy Spirit, which is “life-giving” inasmuch as it brings us into a relationship with God, which transcends death. Thus, for St. Paul, the soul is not identified with the spirit, but instead belongs to the biological hypostasis of humankind. The spirit, however, does not substitute man’s biological hypostasis, but rather releases it from the laws of corruption in order to overcome death and live eternally. The “spiritual” person and the “spiritual body” of our being, which Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 15, is not opposed to matter, but is matter infused by the Holy Spirit, free of decay and death. For Paul, then, the human being is neither only soul nor merely spirit, but a psychosomatic being. The “spiritual body,” which according to St. Paul we shall have at the common resurrection, will not be immaterial, as Origen claimed, but filled with the Holy Spirit, as St. Methodius of Olympus wrote by way of responding to Origen in his treatise on the resurrection.

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The ecological consequence of this teaching is immense. Among other things, it denotes the following: (a) As a psychosomatic being, man is the link between the material creation and God; this link constitutes the presence of the Holy Spirit in human beings. The Holy Spirit is of course “everywhere present and fills all things” but it acts as a link between creation and God only through humankind. Without humanity, material creation is doomed to corruption. (b) Without the Holy Spirit, the human being is “flesh” and “soul,” that is to say, condemned to corruption and death. This also affects all material creation, since it is only through humankind that it can overcome corruption and death. (c) It follows, then, that St. Paul’s cosmology is anthropocentric. Man’s responsibility for the survival of material creation is therefore enormous. Humankind holds in its hands the key to the survival or else destruction of the material world. It is therefore no exaggeration to assert that material creation may be led to destruction as a result of our actions. This is already becoming clear in the current ecological crisis. (d) Precisely because the salvation of material creation depends on humankind, in order to save the world from corruption and death, the Son and Word of God becomes human. He does not become an angel, because that would in no way benefit material creation. The aim of the Incarnation of the Word is not limited to man but extends to all of creation. It was a mistake on the part of Origen—and, alas, it is a mistake of many Orthodox theologians—to believe that the material world is destined to disappear and exists only to serve the spiritual needs of man. This position was refuted by Methodius of Olympus and rejected by the patristic tradition. Furthermore, St. Athanasius of Alexandria clearly speaks of the deification not only of human beings, but also of all creation, in his Letters to Serapion on the Holy Spirit. God created the material world to survive and be glorified, and any destruction of the material world comprises a transgression against God’s will and, therefore, sin. There

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exists, then, what we might call ecological sin, something that must definitely be inserted into the vocabulary of our spiritual elders. (e) In this sense, as human being, Christ unites and redeems creation from corruption and destruction. Without Christ there is no solution to ecological devastation—not because Christ as divine can miraculously save material creation, but because as true human being, He is able to incorporate and transform humanity and all of us into a link between created and uncreated, thereby redeeming creation from corruption. (f) It is at this point that the Church’s vital importance for ecology becomes evident. According to St. Paul, Christ is “the first-born of all creation” precisely because he is the head of the Church. The Church exists not only to save souls. It exists also to sanctify all creation. What many Orthodox overlook today is echoed in the liturgical life of the Church, which is replete with prayers “for favorable seasons” and “for an abundance of the fruits of the earth” (which our faithful would not taste before they were blessed by the Church), for animals and waters, against drought, and so on. The Orthodox Church is the most ecological expression of Christianity, a fact which tends to be overshadowed by the introduction of a foreign pietism that focuses on the Church’s concern for people’s soul and supposedly spiritual affairs. In any case, as we have already underlined, the Divine Eucharist is the most ecological manifestation of the Church, where material creation is not simply sanctified, but becomes the Body and Blood of Christ—in other words, where material creation is deified. All this is wonderfully summarized in five verses of the Letter to the Romans (8:19–23), which is also the most ecological passage in Paul’s writings. Allow me to cite and comment on this passage: Creation awaits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the

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whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now, and not only creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Verse 19 literally states that “all of creation awaits with eager longing for God to reveal his children.” The word “ἀποκαραδοκεῖ” (“awaits with eager longing”) is not coincidental. Paul does not simply say “with expectation,” but uses the words “with eager longing,” which implies fervent expectation. Translating this into theological language signifies that material creation has an inherent tendency, a momentum or end. In Aristotle’s terminology, this might be expressed in the term “entelechy.” However, for Aristotle, this propensity refers and leads to natural purposes, while for Paul it relates to persons (“to reveal his children”). Nature, then, looks to the realization of the adoption of humankind, an adoption that will be realized in the person of the only begotten Son of God. In other words, the fervent expectation of creation is found in the deification of man in Christ. Creation looks to humankind; it is human-oriented (what modern physics calls the “Anthropic Cosmological Principle,” according to which the universe is constructed in such a way as to highlight human existence and activity). Verse 20 explains why creation looks to man: “Creation was subject to futility,” that is, to corruption and death “not of its own will, but by the will of him who subjected it in hope”— namely, because of man’s Fall. Humanity, then, is responsible for the problems of creation because prior to the Fall there was no corruption or death. As science claims, before the appearance of man, the struggle and competition among the various species (and, therefore, the corruption and death of all creatures) were already present in the natural world. Subjection to corruption and death did not come as a result of the Fall; however, the Fall brought about the loss of the ability to overcome them in order for creation to attain true and eternal life. The tragedy of man’s Fall for the rest of creation is that God’s original plan for the deification of creation through humankind was abolished and abandoned by human freedom. Thus, along with the rest of creation, man was subordinated to the futility of false life that is subject to death.

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Verse 21 describes how, thanks to Christ, the hope of liberation from corruption nevertheless did not disappear. This is the hope that “that creation itself would one day be set free from its bondage to corruption”—not by itself but through “sharing the glorious liberty of the children of God.” We should note that, for St. Paul, the destiny of creation is connected to the destiny of humanity, and vice versa, the salvation of humanity is tied to the salvation of the material world. Humankind and the environment die together and live together. By destroying the natural environment, humanity is destroying itself. And by respecting the natural environment, humanity ensures its own existence. Verse 22 is arguably the most striking ecological declaration: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now.” Creation is groaning, and we see this very clearly when animal species disappear daily as a result of ecological turmoil, when the Arctic ice that for centuries provided sanctuary to so many species melts and leads these creatures to extinction, when the overheating of the earth and resulting rapid climatic change profoundly disrupt nature’s balance so that numerous and diverse species of the planet cannot seek refuge for survival on our planet. Who among us listens to this groaning of creation, when we are deeply preoccupied in saving our economy (namely, our own prosperity and self-gratification); we simply have no time to pay attention to the groaning of creation. St. Paul’s sensitivity, however, is able to discern this groaning, even if the ecological crisis was not yet apparent in his time. For him, just as for the Desert Fathers after him, the death of a bird is sufficient to bring tears to his eyes. Have we, who wreak such destruction through our greed, become so hardened and insensitive that we no longer feel creation groaning with pain in our age? In v. 23, St. Paul retains his hope alive because he believes that, despite the prevalence of evil, there still remains the remnant of those who by the power of the Holy Spirit accept adoption in the person of Christ. Paul thus allows the hope of redemption from corruption to appear, since death has been defeated through the Resurrection of Christ and the spirit of adoption has already transformed the lives of the saints. The saints, then, become the models and standards for the development of a consciousness required of everyone at this moment of solemn groaning by all creation.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have endeavored to derive lessons from the theology of St. Paul on the ecological crisis that we face. As mentioned from the outset, Paul lived at an age when humanity’s relationships with the natural environment were more harmonious. However, since his eschatological expectation was so intense that he could not accept the corruption and death to which all creation was subjected due to man’s Fall, Paul eagerly awaits these to be overcome. This is why we are able to draw useful lessons for our contemporary situation. In this way, the Apostle Paul teaches us that the world in which we live is not our property to use as we wish; instead, we are merely stewards and administrators of material creation. Therefore, we are called to respect the laws established by the creator for a balanced coexistence and development of the species and elements of the universe. We are called to explore these laws, but not to interfere with them by altering them; we must allow nature the right to exist as it wants and not as we want. Science is called to subject knowledge to wisdom, thereby setting limits on its quests when these endanger the natural balance. On the other hand, the human person is called to become “Eucharistic,” recognizing whatever he has and whatever he is as gifts so that he can overcome the crisis that plagues us. All of this may be difficult or even seem impossible in a culture like ours, where individualism and the values of atheistic humanism prevail. In this atmosphere, St. Paul’s teaching will sound as strange as his preaching on the Areopagus. However, the Church has no other solution to offer this ecological crisis than precisely this teaching. Its Eucharistic and ascetic ethos is the only witness and contribution that the Church can offer to the ecological disaster that threatens us. And it should not neglect to propose them because the responsibility for protecting God’s creation belongs to all of us and primarily to the Church.

2 The Book of Revelation and the Natural Environment

Nineteen hundred years have passed since, according to tradition as well as scientific research, the book of the Apocalypse was written on the island of Patmos by St. John the Divine. During this long period the book has never ceased to exercise fascination over its readers, both inside and outside the Church. This is due to the style as well as the content of the book: the style is marked by heavy and complex symbolism, which lends itself to countless interpretations allowing the imagination often to “roam wild,” while the content refers to such upheavals in the existing historical as well as natural order that “apocalypse” has become identical with the worst catastrophe that we can refer to. All this explains a great deal of what Church history tells us about this book. The hesitation of the official Church to include it in the scriptural canon for many centuries is one of the most notable facts. Another is the remarkable silence imposed on this book as is evident from the lack of patristic commentaries on it for about eight centuries. Finally, the sudden and widespread exploitation of the book in the Middle Ages, particularly in the West, to support all sorts of religious ideas, usually marked by fanaticism and extraordinary psychological manifestations, has given the book a mysterious character. Even among the Orthodox of our time, in spite of the true spirit of the Orthodox tradition to be found in the Greek Fathers, a fanatical rhetoric is often spread among the faithful, particularly in connection with the number 666, that renders the Apocalypse a terrifying and in some cases irrational text.

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As an alternative to this frenetic approach, biblical scholarship in the last few decades has enabled us to look at this book with more sober eyes. Thus, with regard to its symbolic images, we know that they all come from Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic language and are meant to conceal references to contemporary historical realities—especially ones related to Rome and its persecutions of the early Christians—so that the book might not provoke the wrath of the civil authorities. These symbolisms were therefore not meant to be “mystical” in some Pythagorean sense but vehicles of communication among the faithful of the early communities versed in the Jewish tradition and its later apocalyptic imagery. The other important point that has emerged from biblical research is that the main symbolic imagery of the book comes from the liturgical experience of its readers, particularly in the form of the Eucharist. One can say without exaggeration that the book of the Apocalypse is a Eucharistic liturgy or a commentary on such a liturgy. Without the liturgy this book remains incomprehensible or is seriously misunderstood. Finally, it must be underlined that it is the theology of the book that matters in the end, not its symbolism. The book must be approached hermeneutically—that is, with reference to its diachronic existential significance. The book intends to put forward messages of ultimate significance for the life of the world, and it is to these that we must turn our attention. What does the book of Revelation tell us about the ecological crisis of our time? We can only answer this question if we dig deeply into the theology of the book. Some of its fundamental theological principles bearing directly on ecology are, in my view, the following.

History Viewed Eschatologically One aspect of this principle is that all historical reality must have some ultimate significance. Nothing is wasted. Even evil contributes to the final purpose of history. It is a fundamental biblical belief, shared also by the author of the Apocalypse, that Satan is a servant of God’s purposes; he is used by God to bring about the fulfillment of His will (cf. Job). Later on, in the patristic period and under the influence of Platonism, evil came to be regarded as “μή ὂν [me on]”—that is, a mere negation or absence of the good. But even

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then the belief survived that what happens in history, whether good or evil, comprises part of a purpose which is to be revealed in the end. The prophet—and St. John certainly claims to be a prophet—is given by God the charisma to reveal to us this ultimate significance. If prophecy makes no sense without history, since it is nothing but an interpretation of it, then equally history ceases to be history unless it has a meaning, that is, unless it is somehow linked with prophecy. This eschatological approach to history, therefore, involves revelation or an apocalypsis. This Greek word for “apocalypse” means an “uncovering” or “unveiling”—no doubt of the ultimate significance of historical events. Why did the term “apocalypsis” acquire the meaning of “catastrophe”? Simply because the uncovering of many historical events, notably those of a negative character, will be marked by the revelation of their failure to prevail. Apocalypsis is therefore the final attempt of evil to impose itself on history as a reality, and it is this that renders evil so threatening at the apocalyptic time. The “unveiling” of evil, historically often mistaken for good, is a necessary aspect of eschatology due to the factor of freedom. Freedom underlies all evil. This in turn makes apocalypsis take the form of a real clash between good and evil. Now the purpose of prophecy is not simply to satisfy foreknowledge, but to call us to repentance. Prophecy in the Bible is not to provide us with knowledge, but to make us act, by changing our attitudes and behavior; in this respect, it is like other charisms for the edification of the Church and the world at large. Certainly this is the intention of the author of the book of the Apocalypse.

History Viewed Cosmologically One of the novelties of the book of Revelation is that it introduces cosmology into eschatology. It is commonly accepted that the Hebrew mind was conditioned historically, while the Greeks had a more cosmological interest. With all the qualifications that one should add to this general thesis, its principal claim remains true. Judaism in its eschatology was interested basically in the final outcome of the history of Israel. The author of the Apocalypse, although brought up in this spirit of Judeo-Christian apocalypticism, is also interested in the natural world, not only as a source from which

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to draw his symbolism but as a reality in itself. He thus describes the effect of the last days on the natural elements and speaks of a “new heaven” and a “new earth” as part of the eschatological vision. This is extremely important inasmuch as it introduces—for the first time—what we may call cosmological prophecy into the Judeo-Christian tradition. A Christian is now called on to think of the Kingdom of God not only in terms of the salvation of human beings, but also in terms of the survival and well-being of the entire creation. This did not prove to be an easy matter in the course of Church history. Already in the third century AD, Origen had cast this eschatology into doubt by teaching that the material creation was the outcome of the Fall, and that it is the spiritual world which will finally survive. In the beginning of the fourth century, Methodius of Olympus wrote a treatise to refute this view, stressing the belief that God created the material world not in order to let it perish but to live forever. Nevertheless, about a century later in the West, the great theologian Augustine of Hippo saw the Kingdom of God as a place where only human souls would exist. Indeed, the patronage that he has enjoyed in this position has been persistent, at least in Western Christianity. By contrast, the cosmological dimension was stressed in the anthropology of theologians such as Maximus the Confessor (in the seventh century AD) in the East, although the tendency to think anthropocentrically has also been observed there, even up to our own time. This anthropocentrism—which we could call anthropomonism—must have contributed greatly to the appearance of the ecological problem. It is of paramount importance for ecology that our Christian tradition replace this anthropomonism with a cosmologically conditioned view of the human being, in line with the cosmological propheticism of the Apocalypse.

History and Cosmology One of the basic characteristics of the text of the Apocalypse is its universalistic eschatology. By the term “universalistic” we do not wish to conjure up theories of universal salvation or recapitulation (apokotastasis), but the simple fact that the author of the Apocalypse sees the ultimate significance of history as involving all

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peoples of the world. The “Lamb of God” is presented by John as the only person worthy to unseal the book of history and reveal its ultimate meaning “because he was slain and bought us for God in his blood from every race and language and people and nation.” The importance of this universal eschatology for our subject hardly needs to be stressed. More than any other problem of humanity, the ecological crisis reveals the truth that the world forms one community, and that even the slightest violation of nature in one part of the world leads inevitably to consequences affecting the rest of the world. The book of Revelation with its universal eschatology unveils before us the ultimate solidarity of the human race and calls us to common action for the protection of the natural environment regardless of differences. In the end, we shall all be one because the world in which we live is one.

The World Is a Liturgy The book of the Apocalypse is a liturgical book. By “liturgical” we mean that it takes a view of the world with specific characteristics. It is a movement, a dynamic reality. It is not a static reproduction of a fixed prototype as it was conceived by Platonism. It is neither recycled nor reproduced eternally. Like the Byzantine Eucharistic liturgy, it is a movement toward an end, a final purpose. Its natural resources are thus neither endless nor purposeless; they are “sacred” in that they have a sacred purpose for which they exist. Each of its elements, no matter how small, is sanctified through the sacred purpose which lies within it. zzIt is a relational reality. No part of the world can be conceived in itself apart from its relation with the other parts. The world is thus like a picture, and this is how St. John sees it in the Apocalypse, particularly in chs. 4–5. If you remove or destroy one bit of it, you destroy the whole picture. It needs a priest, someone who will freely unify it and refer it back to its Creator. Man is the “priest of creation,” the one who is called to treat the world not only with respect but also with creativity so that its parts may form a whole and this whole may transcend its boundaries by being brought into relation with God. This makes the human being indispensable for creation. The axiom promoted by most ecologists that man needs nature, but nature does not need man does not have any place in a

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liturgical view of the world. On the contrary, if we take seriously what natural science now calls “the anthropic principle”1 we must attribute to the human being an indispensable role in creation. It is a role not only in the world’s preservation but also in its cultivation so that its ultimate meaning and purpose may be revealed (apokalypsis) through the human being.

Conclusion These observations are not meant to exhaust the vast subject indicated earlier. They are intended simply to underline some basic principles of the theology of the book of Revelation, which in my view are of special importance to those wishing to approach the ecological problem at its deepest level. For it is my firm conviction that the solution of the ecological problem is not simply a matter of management and technicalities, important as these may be. It is a matter of changing our spiritual attitudes, indeed of changing our very worldview. The book of the Apocalypse is pertinent to this task. In the first place, it invites us to think eschatologically. Unfortunately, in our culture the eschatological outlook has been replaced by a present-dominated mentality. We have expelled the future from our way of thinking and we tend to exhaust our interest in what the world can offer us now. Apocalypse calls us to become future-oriented in our culture. This is extremely important for ecology. Second, the cosmological outlook which Revelation introduces into its concept of history calls us to revise our understanding of sin. We are used to regard sin mainly in anthropological or social terms. But there is also a sin against nature, since evil upsets the created order as a whole. Cosmology must enter our ethical perspective, and this calls for a revolution in our education, our sermons, and our textbooks. Editor’s note: “The anthropic principle” (or law of human existence), to which Metropolitan John returns throughout this book, entails the notion that human life is a given condition of the universe, leading some scientists to believe that the creation of the universe is consistent and compatible with the creation of human life. It was originally conceived by Australian physicist Brandon Carter in 1973 at a conference in Kraków honoring the 500th anniversary since the birth of Copernicus. 1

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Third, Revelation calls us to realize the universal character of the world’s fate. The world is a unity and humanity is in the end but one. The slogan “one world or none” is supported by the theology of the Apocalypse. Finally, the book of Revelation invites us to acquire a liturgical ethos in the broad sense of the term. We must behave “liturgically”— that is, we should treat the world as a sacred reality possessing ultimate meaning and entrusted to us not for consumption but for cultivation and protection of this ultimate meaning. We are priests and not lords or even managers of creation. This is “what the Spirit says to the Churches” at a time of ecological crisis. On our way to the island of Patmos2 let us listen to the voice of the Apocalypse carefully. It is particularly relevant to our contemporary problems.

This chapter comprises the keynote address during the First Ecological Symposium organized under the joint auspices of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Prince Philip, chairman of the World Wide Fund for Nature, in September 1995. 2

3 Creation Theology An Orthodox Perspective

The Orthodox theology of creation derives from two sources: patristic doctrine and liturgy. I shall try to refer briefly to the historical background of this theology before attempting to present its significance for the ecological problem.

The Patristic Doctrine of Creation “Creation” is a term which patristic theology found, from the beginning, to be convenient in order to express its own worldview. It is a term which indicates that the world, as we know it, is a work or product of someone, the result of a certain personal cause. The normal Greek term corresponding to creation is demiourgia, although the Fathers of the first centuries, for reasons that exceed the scope of this chapter, preferred to use the term “ktisis”—a word that conjures up images of craftsmanship or rather of constructing and erecting an edifice. Now the view of the world as a “creation” by someone was by no means a Judeo-Christian invention. The idea was widespread at the time of the rise of Christianity that the world was created by some creator, and what the Church had to do was not so much to insist on this idea as to offer its own interpretation of it. The main views of creation that the Church had to face and from which it was seen to dissociate itself fell into two categories: one was the Gnostic

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interpretation of creation, and the other was what we may call the Platonist or classical Greek, philosophical view. Gnosticism took the view that the world in which we live is so penetrated with evil, pain, suffering, and so on that it could not have been created by God the Father, whose goodness would never have allowed Him to create such a world. In order to keep God the Father free from any responsibility for the evil that permeates the world, Gnosticism attributed creation to the lowest of the intermediaries between the ineffable Father and the created world. This was called Demiourgos (literally “creator”). Gnosticism believed that creation is by definition bad, and had no interest in saving it, particularly in its material form. Man, according to certain Gnostic myths, was created before the material world was made, and his material state of existence constitutes his Fall. Caring, therefore, for the material creation was the most absurd and in fact sinful thing there is. The sooner you dispense of this material creation the better. It is well known that the Church took a very negative view of the Gnostic attitude toward creation. Toward the end of the second century AD, St. Irenaeus of Lyons becomes the most famous opponent of the Gnostic doctrine of creation. For him, as well as for the official Church position expressed in the early creeds, the material creation (“all things visible and invisible”) is good, and was made by God the Father Himself. There is no opposition between God and matter. Although there is no ontological affinity between the two, there is nevertheless a profound communion between them. Platonism and the mainstream classical Greek thought assumed the extreme opposite position to that of Gnosticism. Between God and creation there is an ontological affinity (syggeneia). Creation, everything “is filled with gods.” Plato’s Demiourgos is called Father, and it was he that created the world, albeit in conformity to preexisting matter and ideas. Even in Neoplatonism which showed a distaste for the material world, creation is an emanation from God Himself. With regard to the Platonist view of creation, the Fathers reacted more gently than they did to Gnosticism, yet with the same determination. Creation has had a beginning and therefore, unlike the view of Greek philosophy, is not eternal. It is a creation ex nihilo: it came out of nothing and can return to nothing. But what does “being created out of nothing” imply existentially? Moreover, how does the world “experience” the fact that it has had

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a beginning and can have an end? These questions directly affect the approach of the Church to the ecological problem. The first consequence of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is that creation, taken in itself, constitutes an entity surrounded and conditioned by nothing: it came from nothing and its existence is permeated by nothing. The universe is finite, and—logically—is bound to have an end. Second, the space-time structure of the universe is experienced and realized as, in the words of Gregory of Nyssa, diastema— namely, as distance and separation between the elements and beings that constitute it, amounting to the reality of corruptibility and death. As a result of this, there is no guarantee that creation can survive with the help of some natural quality or power in its possession. Only God is eternal and immortal by nature. Indeed, the entire patristic tradition would insist on this. This actually constitutes the line of demarcation between the biblical and the pagan views of creation. Any assumption that creation is endowed with a natural capacity for immortality would automatically imply its divinization; it would amount to the view that there is besides God another “god.” This is all very clear, and yet, alongside this position, the Fathers and the Church believed that the world was not created in order to disappear in the end, but in order to live forever. If we exclude the assumption that creation possesses in its nature some factor securing its survival or still wants to secure its survival, then we are left with only one solution: We must find a way of uniting the world with God, the only immortal being, other than any natural affinity between the two. We must find a way of uniting God and creation without abolishing the natural otherness between them—that is to say, without falling into paganism.

The Place of Man in Creation Patristic tradition offers, by way of a solution to this problem, the place of the human being in creation. It is in humanity that we must seek the link between God and the world, and this is precisely what makes the human being—in a sense the only being—responsible for the fate of creation, what an awful responsibility and what a glorious mission at the same time! “Man is the glory of God,”

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declares St. Irenaeus, and with good reason. But by what qualities can the human being fulfill this awesome responsibility? Patristic theology speaks of the human being in terms of creation in the image of God (imago Dei). It is at this point that we must seek illumination concerning the capacity of the human being to serve and fulfill the divine will of the survival of the naturally mortal creation by being united with the naturally immortal God. How are we to understand the concept of imago Dei in its ecological implications? If we look carefully at the history of theology, the impression we get at first sight is that the human being is the link between God and creation through the quality of rationality. Even the Greek Fathers seem to speak of the imago Dei in such terms: man is logikos, and it is because of this that man can act as the link between God and creation. A particular trend in the Eastern tradition going back to Origen of Alexandria and culminating in Evagrius of Pontus speaks of the human mind (nous) as the place where God and man meet and unite. This, of course, implies that the material creation is finally irrelevant, which amounts to an anti-ecological position. The Western Christian tradition, beginning with Augustine of Hippo, also understands humanity in terms of rationality, which leads not only to a spirituality of dematerialization of creation but, even worse, as evident in the expression of this tradition by the scientist-philosopher René Descartes and his influence on modem Western civilization, to an attitude of the domination of human rationality over material nature. The mainstream of Greek patristic thought seems to differ in the way that it understands human rationality. The imago Dei consists for them, too, in humanity’s reason (logos), but this is not understood in the sense of the human ability to think, but rather in the human capacity to be free (autexousios). Freedom for Greek patristic thought is not, as with modern Western philosophy, a moral or psychological notion including the capacity of choice, but indicates instead the ability to affirm or deny the very existence of something involving one’s own existence. In other words, the human being is endowed with the freedom to either destroy creation or affirm its existence. The realism of this anthropology is revealed tragically in the ecological crisis. The human being can be both the curse and the hope of creation. This understanding of freedom is based on an anthropology which conceives the human being as an integral part of the natural creation, as an animal in the biological sense, which is not distinguished radically

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from the rest of the animals in terms of consciousness and rationality since, as Charles Darwin demonstrated, this capacity is to be found also in other animals, with a difference of degree, but not of kind. Human freedom lies in the tendency to transcend the limitations of nature to the point of denying nature itself or anything given. This is what, on the positive side, allows the human being to create, for example through art, which is not an imitation of the existing world but the personal creation of another world. The human being is not called simply to preserve nature; it is called to liberate it from its bondage to mortality. Such an anthropology is not satisfied with the understanding of the human being as the steward of creation; it goes further than that inasmuch as it views humanity as the priest of creation. The Orthodox tradition is distinguished by its strong emphasis on the Eucharist. As in the case of ecclesiology, in ecology, too, the Eucharist cannot but dominate the Orthodox ethos. Let me offer some observations in this respect. I have already referred to man’s tendency to treat creation as a reality which he can take into his hands, either freely referring it to himself, thereby condemning it to its natural limitations, which include decay and death, or else transcending it by referring it to the Creator and by re-creating it in the form of art or by means of expressing communion and love. Therefore, in the hands of the human being, creation becomes either material for production and means for consumption and self-satisfaction, or else a reality that is freely given to him in order to elevate it to the state of something worthy of survival. In a Eucharistic approach to creation, the human being performs the Christological act of “assuming” creation. This is achieved by acknowledging, in a “Darwinian” sense, that humanity is an organic part of the rest of creation—namely, by an incarnational act in which creation is “assumed” in order to be “healed” by referring creation to the Father as “Your own of your own.” This act transcends the natural limitations of creation and, by sharing it with everyone, turns it into a gift, in the double sense of something received and offered. In the Orthodox liturgical tradition, the Eucharist is strongly marked with the presence of the material creation; the cosmic aspect is always fundamental. The Eucharistic elements are called the Gifts. There is an immense ecological significance in this perspective. I can find, therefore, no better way of summarizing the place of creation in the Orthodox tradition than drawing the implications of creation as gift.

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Creation as Gift Is the world something self-explicable—that is, something that contains in itself the reason of its existence—or is it a reality that owes its existence to a cause outside itself? The answer to this question determines the borderline between those who understand the world as creation and those who believe that the world is a reality which sustains itself through its own laws and is in a sense an eternal process of self-renewal. The religions that draw their faith from the Bible belong to the first category. For them, the world is not eternal and self-explicable, but instead owes its existence to a personal God who brought it freely into existence. In other words, for those who believe in the Bible, creation is the gift of a Person. Let us reflect more deeply on this matter in order to understand its implications of the ecological problem. 1. A gift is always free. Creation is not a necessity for God. God did not create the world because He needed it in any sense. He could exist without the world. The world is not a self-fulfillment of God or an extension of His being. It is ontologically and totally other than God. Between created and uncreated existence there is no ontological similarity. The Giver and the gift are not to be confused with each other. This is a fundamental principle of the biblical faith. 2. A gift is an expression of love. The Fathers of the Church, notably Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor and others, speak of divine ecstasis and eros as the motive of creation. The unmovable God moves outside Himself in a movement of love and gives existence to a new and different being. Just as He is love in Himself as Holy Trinity, He extends the same love outside His own being and gives existence to the world. The Christian faith goes deeper into this truth and speaks, in the words of St. Paul, of the creation of the world “in Christ” and “for Christ”—that is, in and through the same love that unites the Father with the Son in the Holy Spirit eternally. In other words, God creates the world, not accidentally or arbitrarily, but because He is love. Creation is, therefore, not something different from divine grace; it is grace itself.

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3. A gift exists only in communion with the Giver. Any gift that exists outside the relationship with the person who offers it loses its meaning. It may continue to exist as a thing, but it is no longer a gift. In the case of creation, this means that the very existence of the world is a gift; therefore, outside its relationship with the Giver, the very existence of the gift is threatened. The world outside communion with God is threatened with death, with nonexistence. As a free gift of divine love, creation did not always exist; if it existed always it would not have been a free gift but another God existing eternally with God. This is the meaning of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo: because the world was created out of nothing, it can return to nothing, if it is not in communion with God. There is no other guarantee for the existence of creation except its communion with God. 4. A gift always implies a recipient. You do not offer a gift to no one, but always to someone. Who is the recipient of the gift of creation? Here the importance of the human being becomes crucial. The biblical narrative of the creation of man differs from other stories of creation in a very important detail: in the Bible, the human being is created after the rest of creation and not at the beginning, as in the case of the Gnostic and other nonbiblical stories of creation. The significance of this detail is manifold, according to the Fathers of the Church. First, it means that the human being is able to make use of the rest of creation. This is implied in the word of God addressed to the first human beings in the Bible: Fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, and every living thing that moves upon the earth . . . I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on earth, and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed; they shall be yours for food. All green plants I give for food to the wild animal, to all the birds of heaven, and to all reptiles on earth, every living creature. (Gen. 1:28–30) This means that the human being has received the world as a gift from God in order to enjoy it.

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Second, the creation of the human being at the end and not at the beginning signifies that the human being is itself an organic part of creation and cannot exist outside it. This is important, although it is usually forgotten by Christians. It is also part of the cause that produces the ecological crisis. It is often assumed that the human being can exist without the rest of creation—whether as a spiritual being that does not need the material world or as someone who can destroy the rest of creation and yet still continues to exist. We must correct both of these fallacies. The human being without his body is a phantom, an incomplete human being. We do not “have” bodies, we are bodies. This is why faith in the resurrection of the body is a fundamental article of the Christian faith. As bodies, we are parts of the rest of the material world. The theory of evolution is not in opposition to the Christian faith; it reminds us of the fact that we belong organically to the rest of creation, and that we cannot exist without it. Third, the fact that the human being was created at the end and not at the beginning indicates that there is purpose in creation, and that this purpose is entrusted to the human being. What then is the purpose, and what is the role of the human being in fulfillment of this purpose? The story of creation in the Bible speaks of man as being fashioned “in the image and likeness” of God. The exact meaning of this expression has been the subject of much discussion in Christian theology. The Church Fathers seem to converge in the understanding of the imago Dei as referring to the rationality of our humanity, combined with its freedom. The human being is “rational” not because there is no such thing as rationality in other creatures—for example, in the higher animals—but because, unlike the rest of the animals, we are free from the bondage of nature and can create our own personal world out of it. In other words, the rationality of discovering the laws of nature and adjusting to them is to be found also in the animals. However, it is only the human being that can take nature in its hands and make a new creation out of it. The human being alone can be a creator imitating, in this way, its own Creator. Thus the imago Dei involves the human capacity to be “like God” in the world, not in the sense of a capacity to destroy creation—God as Creator does not destroy, but only creates out of love—but to take nature into our hands and freely in love cultivate it and use it as material for our creativity.

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It is in this capacity, as the only free being in the material creation, that the human being is the recipient of creation as a gift from God. God offers the gift of creation to us in order to use it freely as a means of communion with Him—that is, as a link of love between God and creation. It is only the human being, then, in the entire creation that can acknowledge in and through creation the presence of the Creator through His grace and love. It is only the human being that can see in creation the presence of the uncreated love of God, that which, in patristic literature is called, “the divine energies.” Creation, therefore, needs the human being in order to fulfil its purpose and become the gift of God. Humanity’s role in creation is to bring it into communion with God and secure in this way its eternal survival. 5. A gift calls for gratitude and thanksgiving. If the human being is capable of acknowledging the world as a gift, he or she is also the only being that can thank the Giver for the gift by returning it to Him with gratitude. Humanity is the mouth of creation in offering glory and praise to the Creator; he or she is the Eucharistic being of the world. The purpose of God in creating us “in His image and likeness” is to offer creation the possibility to unite with God and respond to His love in freedom. This is what the Greek Fathers call theosis—that is, unity of the created world with the uncreated God. This can be done only through the human being, and it is for this reason that the Greek Fathers teach, that even if the Fall of Adam did not take place, God would still become human as He became in Christ. Christ is nothing other than the fulfilment of the purpose for which humanity was created, namely the theosis of the Cosmos in and through the human being.

The Fall of Man and Its Consequences for Creation Adam failed to fulfil the purpose for which he was created. This was possible because he was endowed by God with the freedom either to acknowledge the world as God’s gift and refer it back to Him in thanksgiving, or else to refer it to himself and thus declare himself

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the ultimate point of reference for all existence—in other words, to declare himself God. The essence of the Fall of humanity is precisely the declaration of itself as God. Through the Fall Adam lost his Eucharistic character and forced creation to serve his own desires and wishes, as if he were the Lord and God of creation. As a result, “creation suffers and groans in travail” (Rom. 8:22), in the words of St. Paul, awaiting its liberation from the bondage in which it was enslaved by man. The ecological crisis testifies to this in a dramatic way. By denying creation its reference to its Creator, the human being condemned it to corruption and death. The consequences of the Fall of humanity for man and creation become evident in the actual ecological crisis and are worth noting. (a) By breaking communion with God and declaring himself, though a creature, to be God, humanity developed a selflove (philautia), which encouraged beyond any measure a greed for more and more pleasure and more and more possessions. This endless search for pleasure and possessions, beyond any possibility of satisfaction, has led the human being to develop “needs” which are not really necessary for his or her existence or well-being and happiness. Happiness thus became identical with pleasure and possessions. Our present “civilization” is built on these two foundations: the search for pleasure and the increase of productivity of goods. The more we produce the happier and more “developed” we regard ourselves. But this means that we have to force nature to produce more that it can actually produce. The result is the ecological crisis that we are experiencing today. (b) Alongside this endless and unsatisfied greed, comes the antagonism and competition between the individual and classes or even nations, which lead to injustice in the sharing of the goods of creation. By losing the faith that creation is a gift, we have automatically lost the feeling that relationship is to be shared and given rather than possessed. It is no wonder, then, that the ecological crisis today is accompanied by a scandalous gulf between poor and rich nations, and that the greatest polluters of the earth are the so-called developed countries. Social justice and ecology are two poles of the same reality, which results from the Fall.

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(c) The most serious result of the Fall, however, is the human confrontation with the threat of nothingness and death. We have already noted that creation has, by definition, a beginning, and by being creatio ex nihilo it is destined to return to “nothing,” if it is left to itself. Only in communion with the Creator can creation avoid the return to nothingness. By refusing to bring creation to communion with God, humans have opened the door to nothingness for all creation. Existence has become “being-unto-death,” as Heidegger has pertinently observed. Since the Fall— that is, since our refusal to refer creation to God and the declaration of ourselves as the ultimate point of reference for all that exists—the fear of death has consciously or unconsciously become the factor that permeates creation. This fear is not simply psychological; it is real and can lead to nothingness. The possibility of a total destruction of life, at least on our planet, is a real one, if the ecological crisis is not controlled. We have faith in God, of course, that He can ultimately save His creation. But as far as our responsibility in creation goes, the possibility of total destruction—of a kind of suicide—is always present. Such is the grandeur and the tragedy of the privilege of the gift of freedom, with which God has endowed the human being.

The Hope of Creation If there is any hope for creation to overcome the consequences of human sin, this is to be found only in the reversal of the attitude of fallen humanity so that the world may again be treated as a gift and not as a possession. Only if the human being can become homo eucharisticus can the ecological crisis be overcome. Therefore, the Christian faith has the following contributions to make to the hope of creation: (a) The faith in Christ as the “second” or “last Adam”—that is, as the one who reversed the self-centeredness of the first Adam, by saying to God the Father at Gethsemane “not as I will but as You will” and “Your will be done.” This of course meant that the human being had to crucify himself,

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to die to himself and to rise, as a new being. Without this self-sacrifice, there is no possibility of overcoming the consequences of the human Fall for creation. Faith in Christ means faith in the cross and resurrection of the human being. Through the cross and resurrection, Christ showed that we can overcome the consequences of the Fall and again become priests of creation—that is, the ones who would refer creation back to its Creator, acknowledging with thanksgiving that it is a gift and not a possession, thereby reestablishing its communion with God. (b) What Christ did “once and for all,” the Holy Spirit does for ever and ever, “to the ages of ages” in the Church, particularly through the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. After undergoing the experience of baptism, as the death of the “old man” (i.e., the first Adam) and the rebirth of the “new man” (i.e., the “Christ-like” human being), the members of the Church form a community which offers to the Father as thanksgiving (eucharistia) all of creation recapitulated in the body of the “last Adam,” Christ. In the Eucharist, the human being acts as Christ (i.e., as the priest of creation), declaring solemnly and symbolically that the world is a gift and has to be treated as such in all respects. Furthermore, in the same Eucharist, the Gifts (as the Eucharist is significantly called in the liturgical language) are not only referred to God with thanksgiving, but they are also shared by the members of the community. Creation is not a gift vertically but also horizontally. Communion with God and communion with one another are two aspects of the same Eucharistic reality. There is no communion without justice, just as there is no Eucharist, as offering to God, without being, at the same time, an offering to the brothers and sisters—that is, to all human beings that share the same Eucharistic reality. The Eucharist is the best antidote to the ecological crisis that the Christian faith can offer the world today. (c) The Eucharist takes place at certain times in the life of the Church, but its consequences for the life of the Christian are continuous. There is “a liturgy after the liturgy.” When the members of the Church go out into the world, after the

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liturgy, they bring with them a certain ethos, an attitude to creation with important ecological implications. From this ethos results an ecological ethic, which is very much needed in our time. An ethic, however, must always be rooted in an ethos in order to have permanent results. Ethics is a rational and individualistic concept, and it is often a provocation to human freedom. People will not be persuaded to behave properly toward creation, unless they are brought up in a community that involves and includes them from their childhood in symbolic acts and behaviors, which accustom them to a certain attitude toward nature. This is what the liturgy offers to people, not a list of “musts” or ethical propositions, but a set of symbols in and through which they become accustomed to treat creation with respect, regarding it as a gift to be acknowledged and shared. It is an ecological ethos rather than ecological ethic that we need today. And this is precisely what the liturgy can offer. (d) When it comes to ethics, there is probably nothing more important that the Church can offer, as an antidote to the crisis, than the spirit of asceticism, which the saints of the Church practice in their lives. Asceticism is not a contempt or denial of the material creation. Matter and the body are not evil or bearers of evil. They are good and precious gifts of God which must be referred to the Creator with gratitude and appreciation. Asceticism has nothing to do with a depreciation of the material world. It only has to do with human will and its liberation from selfishness and from unnecessary “needs” created by the consumerist society of developed economies. By reducing human needs to their essentials, asceticism protects the natural environment from human greed. At the same time, it allows more people to share in the natural resources and contributes to justice in human societies.

Man’s Responsibility in Creation Let me conclude by summarizing the main points emerging from this chapter about the Orthodox tradition concerning the theology of creation in its relation to the ecological problem.

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1. Creation, owing to its having come ex nihilo, is in its nature subject to perdition. Only by grace can it survive. There is no room for complacency in the face of the ecological evil. 2. The fate of creation has been entrusted to the human being, who can destroy or save and fulfill it. This is the ecological relevance of the patristic understanding of the imago Dei. Being grace—that is, not being a necessity for God, which is one of the implications of the creatio ex nihilo idea)— creation can only survive freely. The imago Dei is the capacity for freedom, as St. Gregory of Nyssa and other Church Fathers insist. Here Trinitarian theology becomes decisive. In a positive sense, the imago Dei is in fact imago Trinitatis; the Greek Fathers excessively emphasized the use of the first person plural in the relevant biblical text: “let us make man in our image and likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Therefore, in being imago Dei, the human being is called to be a relational being—that is to say, a being who, like the Trinitarian God, transcends freely the boundaries of selfhood and of nature itself in relationality and communion. 3. The passage of Rom. 8:18–21 must be understood in this light. Creation “groans in travail” because it has been subject to mortality on account of the human being. Its problem is not psychological (i.e., suffering) but ontological (i.e., mortality and perdition). The nonhuman part of it, which is not made in imago Dei, cannot transcend in freedom its bondage to mortality. It awaits, therefore, “with eager expectation” the “glorious liberty of the children of God.” Only the human being can offer it hope. 4. The Eucharist is the act of such free transcendence, the “medicine” of immortality, to adopt the words of St. Ignatius of Antioch. It is so, first of all Christologically, since Christ (as the true Adam), by offering himself to the Father (as the head of all creation), liberates creation from mortality through the cross and resurrection. It is also so, ecclesiologically, because the Eucharist is nothing else but the community which embodies all of creation and offers it as Christ’s crucified and risen body. In his capacity as homo eucharisticus, the human being treats creation as a gift freely

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offered, freely received, acknowledged and referred back (eucharistia is anaphora) and freely shared (in communion). In the Eucharist “the glorious liberty of the children of God” embraces creation with love and, by making it part of humanity, enables it to transcend its mortality. 5. Is this a kind of “sacramentalism” that is empty of any “practical” significance for ecology? The answer depends on the expectations raised by the word “practical.” Certainly we cannot clean the air or the waters simply by celebrating the Eucharist. The Orthodox are just as responsible for the ecological crisis as anyone else. And yet, at the same time, it remains true that this crisis is basically a cultural rather than a practical problem. Our culture has lost its liturgical dimension by replacing the symbolic with the conceptual. Because of this what we need above all is not ethics but ethos—as we have seen and as we shall further develop in later chapters, there is a vast difference between the two. In this sense, what I have tried to present here may not be so practical, but I hope that it is not useless either, in the light of our concern for the protection of God’s creation.

II

Theological Approaches



4 Orthodoxy and the Ecological Crisis

The ecological crisis is the most serious contemporary problem facing us. To some extent the Christian tradition bears responsibility for causing it; certainly the ecological crisis has important spiritual dimensions that need to be examined. The Orthodox theological tradition in particular has important things to say on this subject. From an historical perspective biblical thought has a positive view of the natural world and of our human bodies. Thus creation initially was seen as good and the material world as worthy of survival. But in the first century Gnosticism distinguished between the material world (as bad) and the true or real world (as spiritual). This approach was adopted by Christian theologians in the third century, such as Origen in the East and the Catechetical School of Alexandria, who stressed the spiritual significance of everything material. That is to say, everything material is a degradation of the original creation of God and meant simply to be a symbol of higher things. Origen very much influenced the Eastern and especially the monastic tradition. In the West similar influences appeared. Great theologians such as St. Augustine made an impact on Western theology and on the Western Church. Augustine himself was influenced by Neoplatonism. His conviction was that what matters is the spirit or soul of the human being and that even in the Kingdom of God what will survive is the soul and not the body. He believed in the resurrection of the body but regarded God’s Kingdom as consisting not of bodies but of souls.

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When we move to the Middle Ages, we find a more rationalistic approach to the world and to the human being in particular. In Scholastic theology the capacity of the human being to think is regarded as the imago Dei—that is, the image of God—in human beings. Descartes, who was himself influenced by Aristotle and Augustine, defined this rationalistic approach with his famous saying “cogito ergo sum”—I think; therefore I am. What matters in order to exist is to be capable of thinking. The material world is to be used by us in order to develop our spiritual capacities and intellectual capabilities. Although the Enlightenment was accompanied by the development of a respect and love for nature, this did not involve regarding nature as having any intrinsic value in itself. Protestantism, and especially the Puritans, made use of the first Genesis creation story to justify human domination of the natural world. The Calvinists did the same, and this has contributed to the contemporary view that human beings have the right to exploit natural resources. Protestantism has generally fostered individual enterprise and rights, utilitarianism and the pursuit of happiness (or, hedonism). This pursuit of happiness was even enshrined in the American constitution and became every individual’s entitlement. As a result, nature becomes simply the raw material which we use to achieve this individual happiness. It is not difficult to see the domination of this ideal today in our culture, which is centered on offering the individual happiness, whether spiritual or material. From this it becomes clear that there are spiritual dimensions to the ecological problem that confronts us. Not only has Christian theology contributed to the emergence of the problem but it has also given spiritual validation to its root cause. The belief in human superiority to the natural world received a blow from Charles Darwin, when he proved that not only humans but also animals, although to a lesser degree, are capable of thinking. So if the human is the image of God, he must be so due to other capabilities than simply his ability to think, and it is these capabilities which we must learn to value. Another spiritual dimension that needs to be reassessed is the individual approach—namely, the idea that each of us can be conceived of as individuals without relation to others or to the world. This idea that we can be isolated from our natural environment and conceived of as autonomous individuals must

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be eliminated, because it helped justify the mistreatment of nature which resulted in the ecological disaster. The human being is not an individual but a person, and there is a big difference between the two. An individual is a single entity that can be conceived of in itself without reference to other entities. A person is a unique entity that cannot be conceived of without relation to other entities—not only to other humans but to nature as a whole. As we have already observed, we do not have a body, we are bodies. We should relate to nature not as individuals standing separately from one another and from nature, but as partakers of nature. It is only by destroying this false sense of individualism and replacing it with personhood—that is, a sense of being in communion with nature—that we can hope to overcome our ecological problems. Finally, we cannot disassociate our search for pleasure and happiness from the ecological disaster that we witness in our world. We must learn not to view the world as a means to our individual happiness. The world is not there to satisfy our desires and offer us pleasure; it is there for a higher purpose. How, then, can Orthodoxy and Orthodox theology help to relate creatively these spiritual dimensions to the environmental crisis? Orthodox theology, in essence, is the way that the Greek Fathers understood, interpreted, and presented the biblical faith which all Christians share, but it is also shaped by the experience and reality of the Church itself. For Orthodoxy, the Christian faith is not an intellectual or abstract concept; instead, it is something to be lived. This experience of the Christian faith can only be found by one as a member of the Church; it is an ecclesial and communal experience and not an individualistic one. Bearing this in mind, the basic theological dimensions of Orthodox Christianity which relate to our ecological task are as follows: 1. The world has a beginning in a radical sense; it was created out of nothing and is constantly threatened by the return to nothingness. It is not eternal; rather, it is fragile, like a precious vase of crystal, and must be approached with reverence, fear, and trembling. 2. This careful handling was entrusted by God to human beings, as distinct from all other beings, including angels. According to patristic theology man was created as material

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and spiritual in order to be a microcosm of creation. Angels, which are only spiritual creations, cannot bring the material world into contact and communion with God. As priests of creation we have the unique mission and immense responsibility of uniting God and the material world. Our task is not simply to preserve creation but to purify it and elevate it to the level of divine existence. This act of elevation—namely, the referral of creation to its Creator—is the essence of our priesthood; thus creation is sanctified and partakes of the blessings that participating in divine life involves. 3. The salvation of human beings, which is offered by and in Christ, is for us a cosmic event. Through human beings all creation will be saved. Christ not only saves us from ourselves; He offers the redemption of the whole of creation. The Incarnation of the Son of God as man was nothing other than the assumption of human nature, not to save humankind in its own right, but because human nature carries with it the rest of created nature by implication. 4. The Eucharist characterizes Orthodox theology not so much as a mental discipline but as an experiential event. Ever since St. Irenaeus, it has been understood that the Eucharist is not simply a commemoration of Christ’s death and resurrection, but is a cosmic event involving the whole of creation. The bread and wine are not just symbolic elements linking the Church to the Last Supper but are representative of the material world and of creation. By the same token, by participating in the Eucharist, human beings participate in a redeemed material world. Thus the material world has its place in the Eucharistic experience and in the Kingdom of God. The Orthodox Christian, by constantly experiencing the Eucharist, affirms that the material world must survive and be redeemed from whatever prevents it from developing into a world that will unite finally with God. 5. The ascetic experience, as affirmed by the Orthodox Church, has unfortunately often been misunderstood as a negative attitude to material creation. The ascetic is seen as one who depreciates or denounces the material world. This is a Neoplatonic way of thinking and is not typical of

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the true asceticism of the Church. The ascetic abstains from the material world not because he or she regards matter as inferior but because he or she respects matter very much and does not want to exploit it for individual pleasure. Another often forgotten dimension of the ascetic experience is that the true ascetic participates in the suffering of the whole of creation, even to the extent of weeping over the death of a bird or animal. This sensitivity toward nature is not negative, but rather reflects a very positive attitude toward nature—one that results from love and respect for the material world. Some Christian sects regard the material world as bad and therefore conclude that the sooner the ecological crisis destroys it the better. Others regard the material world as divine and believe that we need not worry about its welfare, but should instead respect and perhaps even worship it. I believe that, as more and more people realize that for the sake of its survival we must not regard the world as bad, the latter—pagan—approach will soon replace the first attitude, and there are many signs of this already happening. There is, however, a third alternative, which is to regard the material world as fragile and precious, as well as to regard human beings as having the responsibility of sanctifying and referring back to God His own creation, so that it may live forever. This places the responsibility for solving the problem firmly on us as humans. While we can achieve nothing without God’s help, we cannot pass the environmental problem over to God and free ourselves from our responsibility. While ethics and political legislation can offer a lot, they are nonetheless powerless without the participation of the people. If we want to solve the environmental crisis in a democratic way people must be persuaded to sacrifice many things and to a great extent this can only be done through the proper ecclesiastical experience. With specific regard to education, I would like to underline the following points: what we normally understand as education is scientific and technical knowledge. However, convincing people through reason and logic, though important, will not get us very far. I would propose education informed by worship. By this I mean the acquaintance of a human being from childhood with a holistic approach to reality involving all of creation. When a child goes to

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church—in spite of all the distracting gestures and noises it makes that may disturb us as adults—it is educated to regard the material world as part of its relationship with God. All senses participate in Orthodox worship, and unless we become aware of our relationship with God and the material world through our senses, then we cannot hope to understand the significance of material creation. Moreover, the value of ascetic education should not be underestimated. For example, fasting is an educational process through which we learn not to regard the world as an unlimited resource to satisfy individual pleasure. The same is true of almsgiving, hospitality, and so on. If people become acquainted with these values, they will learn to solve the ecological problem. Furthermore, we must teach ourselves and our children that we are members of a community, which regards creation as Christ’s body. Finally, education should also involve creativity and culture. We must extend the Eucharistic experience to artistic activities and everyday life. Such an education through involvement in the life of the Church will result not just in the preservation of creation but in bringing forth all the possibilities for a world in which man will be in perfect communion with God.

5 A Theological Approach to the Ecological Problem

The risk of a mass extinction of “life on the planet” immediately grasps people’s attention. Indeed, though it may initially sound like an exaggeration, the danger of an apocalyptic end of life on our planet is not a matter of prophecy but a foreseeable outcome of the ecological dynamic that has evolved in our era. Only a year ago we read in the press the extrapolation of the distinguished scientist Steven Hawking that the greenhouse phenomenon alone suffices to cause the entire extinction of human life by 3000 AD; in Hawking’s opinion, the only way for this life to be preserved would be that it moves to other planets. It took perhaps the recent floods in Europe and Asia for us to begin to take this hazard seriously. But then again, as the Johannesburg Ecological Summit in 2002 demonstrated, we are still far from realizing the seriousness of the ecological risk. Our priorities seem to lie in other domains—predominantly economic, political, and perhaps also social. The risk of mass extinction of life οn our planet still seems for most people an exaggeration. In the face of such a risk, what is the role that religion and theology can play? Many believe that the ecological problem is a matter for politicians, technocrats, and perhaps scientists to resolve. What do religion and theology have to do with such a problem in the first place? Those who pose this question are oblivious or neglectful of two fundamental truths: (a) The historical roots of the ecological problem are not unrelated to religion and theology. Lynn White, the American historian, in his classic study published in Science magazine

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in 1967,1 demonstrated that the historical responsibility of the present ecological crisis lies with Judeo-Christian theology, as developed and interpreted mainly within the Western Church until modern times, when, chiefly in Protestant circles, God’s blessing to the first humans, that they “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28), was interpreted as a prerogative accorded to man to establish himself as the master of the earth. The combination of this interpretation with what Max Weber calls the Calvinist ethos of capitalism, led directly to the contemporary conception that the physical world is simply raw material for man to produce goods, gain profit, and achieve economic growth. However, as we shall see, theology’s responsibility for the ecological crisis runs even deeper and is linked with momentous philosophical aspects of our contemporary Western civilization. (b) The ecological problem is essentially a spiritual problem. It relates to man’s stance and ethos toward the world surrounding him. Theology talks of man’s Fall and sin, which in fact is none other than that he assumes himself to be the ultimate reference point of all existence; this of course is tantamount to man declaring himself God. This self-divinization of man implies that all creatures exist to fulfill his desires. Individualism and prosperity are thus the fundamental causes of the ecological crisis; without coming to grips with these problems, the ecological problem cannot be resolved. Under democratic regimes especially, there are no politicians or governments that would ever dare oppose the electorate’s demand for more gratification and more affluence, unless the voters themselves called for it. And for voters to want this they would have to “repent” and seek to change their stance and their ethos. There is nothing that could bring this about more successfully than religion. Theology caused the ecological problem; so it must contribute to its resolution. Now for theology to make a valuable contribution in addressing the ecological problem, it must share a common view with

1

“The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” 1203–7.

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philosophy and science in regard to human nature. In this regard, it is most significant to link the discussion on what to do regarding the ecological problem with the question of human nature. Because from a theological as well as a philosophical and scientific aspect, the underlying issue of the ecological problem is man’s alienation from his natural environment. Theology, philosophy, and science must render a common answer on this matter in order for them to cooperate in addressing the ecological crisis.

Man’s Alienation from Nature While every animal accepts and adapts to the material world as its “habitat” or place of habitation, man tends to transcend the material world, of which he is an organic part. In this sense, man both belongs and does not belong to his environment inasmuch as his original homeland and ultimate destination are found beyond this world, which he inhabits and of which he is an organic part. This is certainly how ancient Greek tragedy considered the tragic nature of man. Thus the question of man’s identity and how he is to be defined is posed experientially and then logically—namely, philosophically and even scientifically. What, then, is man? “What is man that you take thought of him” in the words of the psalmist’s rhetorical question to God (Ps. 8:4). The definition of man has been approached many times in the past without reference or correlation to the natural environment. One classic instance is found in ancient Greek philosophy, chiefly in its Platonist guise, while there have also been numerous theological approaches through the centuries that, in the final analysis, always bore the direct or indirect influence of Platonism. The main form assumed by this definition relied on the concept of the soul. Man’s identity was seen to reside in the soul, which is self-existent and self-subsisting, rather than an organic part of the natural world. The essence of man’s identity was considered spiritual and not material, while its survival was independent of the body—in other words, independent of the body’s relation to the material natural world. This Platonist conception deeply influenced Christian tradition, and its implications were of momentous importance for the ecological problem.

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The identification of man with his soul led to the following assumptions during the course of history: (a) The assumption that time and space, fundamental constituents of the natural world surrounding us, make up, along with the perishable body, the prison of the soul. In order tο find himself man must break free from his body, from space and time—that is, from his natural environment— and live an immaterial and atemporal existence, within an eternity that is not linked to the natural world. (b) Since man may be conceived without his relationship to the natural world, in the final analysis it does not matter at all to man whether or not the natural world surrounding him will be annihilated. Ιn fact, for many exponents of ancient Christian theology, such as Origen and Augustine, in the Kingdom of God—as the ultimate destination and outcome of the world—only souls are to survive. The natural world, apart from the souls of human beings and the incorporeal angels, is destined to disappear. So the answer to the question “what is man?” in this case would be the insubstantial spirit or immortal and eternal soul, an entity that can be conceived without any need of a body or the natural environment. A similar attempt to identify and define man without reference to the natural environment, a modified form of Platonist idealism centered around the soul, was undertaken, mainly in the West from the Middle Ages into modern times, by the definition of man as a rational and intelligent being. The answer proposed in this case to the question “what is man?” was that man constituted a rational animal, which in turn meant a being endowed with thought, selfconsciousness, and awareness of the world. This definition, which originated with Augustine and Boethius, came to its culmination with Descartes—a scientist-philosopher, father of the Enlightenment and, to a large degree, of modern mathematics and physics—in the form of his illustrious dictum: “cogito ergo sum.” The consequences of man’s inevitable divorce from his natural environment had a crucial impact on ecology. Thus: (a) Man developed his intellectual capabilities unilaterally and independently of his body. The development of mathematics

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as an instrument producing “pure intelligence” led headlong to the emergence of “intelligent beings” that have no need for the human body in order to produce rational thought. The issue now is whether any residual emotions or appetites remain in the being called man (a weaker intelligence) or whether these too have been sacrificed (a stronger intelligence) on the altar of pure—that is, incorporeal and immaterial—intelligence. Whatever the case, the important and salient point from an ecological aspect is that intelligence was wrested away from the human body so radically as to abrogate it and render it useless. This is the underlying problem with computers and the internet, which also sharply calls to question the innocence of neutrality with which we usually regard these technological attainments. The great and awful risk attendant upon these attainments is that the body is gradually canceled as an instrument of intelligence, given that we think, communicate, market, and even fall in love without the body—that unique instrument that connects us with our natural environment as well as with other people. The body is, therefore, incapable of following the intelligence as information. (b) Man developed his intellectual capabilities to the detriment of his natural environment. This came about as the consequence of two factors. The first is that man realized the power enclosed in intelligence. It is not accidental that the same mind that declared “cogito ergo sum” would, as early as the seventeenth century, produce the following passage in Discours de la Méthode: [With the advancement of science] we can reach knowledge that would be very useful in life and we could find a practical method, whereby the force and energies inherent in fire, water, air, the stars, celestial and all other bodies that surround us [= natural environment] might be used in the same manner in all suitable applications, and so we may become masters and possessors of nature [maîtres et possesseurs de la nature]. The ecological burden in this pronouncement of Descartes is found in the last few words: “masters and possessors of nature”—

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precisely by dint of cogito ergo sum as the power of knowledge. Therefore, Francis Bacon addresses man, in even blunter terms: “Ι bring you nature and all its progeny that you may bind it to your service and render it as your slave.” Is any more clear proof necessary then as to wherein lie the root of our ecological crisis? It lies in the sequestration and elevation of intellectual capability to the point of its becoming the single, overwhelming determinant of man’s identity. Assuredly, a critique of this view readily springs to mind: Might it not be the dominion of intelligence but rather its misuse that is at fault? The same applies to our criticism of the internet: Might the problem actually lie in its misuse? If this is so, then the burden falls on ethics, not ontology. In other words, the problem is not that we glorify our intelligence to the detriment of the natural world, but that we misuse it. The solution of the ecological problem is thereby to be found in the domain of ethics. But an ethics deprived of an ontological basis—that is, lacking a foundation in truth— is unacceptable from a theological perspective. Thus the matter is not whether man acts rightly or wrongly—in terms of his ethical response—but whether he acts in harmony with the truth of his being and his identity. This issue is directly related to a second factor, namely the dialogue between science, philosophy, and theology. It is very easy indeed—and this is what usually happens—for scientific truth and theological truth not to coincide, and for us to remain unconnected, whether they do coincide or not. The scientist has his own truth in physics (the knowledge of nature) and the theologian possesses his “spiritual” truth (that springs from faith). If this is so, where can the scientist meet the theologian? Not of course on the point of truth, since two disparate truths are involved. Their meeting point then is usually found in ethics: both can agree upon whether something is good or bad, permissible or not. What then are the criteria that serve as their basis? And the obvious answer would be the moral values and principles accepted by both sides. Let us consider this issue particularly in respect of the problem of man and his natural environment. Scientists and theologians alike recognize that the natural environment is harmed by the dominion of human intelligence over material nature. If we desired to resolve the problem with the help of ethics, we would say: it is not the dominion of intelligence in itself that is harmful, provided

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that it is not misused or abused. Υet if we delve deeper to the root of things, to the marrow of truth, then scientists and theologians would jointly ask: Could it be that the ascendancy of intelligence, in opposition to man’s and the environment’s physical and natural substance, impinges οn the truth of what man is? We cannot let the theologian and the scientist each hold his own views on this matter. The truth about what man is must be common to both science and theology. We cannot play with two truths: a truth of knowledge on the one hand and a truth of faith on the other. The scientist who is faithful to his prayer book, but indifferent as to whether what he observes in his laboratory is compatible with the tenets of his faith, has undergone a schizophrenic rift and in any case has rendered the dialogue between science and theology impossible. Thus, within any real dialogue of science and theology, the issue of man’s relation with the natural environment must focus οn the question: What relation of man with his natural environment is attuned to the truth of his identity? The answer tο this question must achieve as great a convergence as possible between science and theology. Any deviation must be put to the proof and not be ascribed offhand to an incompatibility of underlying assumptions. This is the only way for theology’s and science’s common stance before the environmental problem to bear a solid ontological, and not merely ethical foundation.

Man’s Truth Relative to the Natural Environment (a) Man is a psychosomatic entity. Man’s truth does not reside in his soul, but in the organic union of soul and body— indeed, for several Church Fathers, also of spirit. This is so fundamental a tenet in the Orthodox creed that to dispute it would amount to heresy. Origen of Alexandria, who posited man’s identity in his soul—even going so far as to speak of the preexistence of souls to the universe’s material creation—was condemned by the Church Fathers and the Fifth Ecumenical Council as a heretic. The soul of man is born along with his body and, most importantly, cannot ultimately gain rest unless it regains the body.

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The late Fr. Georges Florovsky, perhaps the greatest Orthodox theologian of our time, expressed this epigrammatically: “A body without a soul is but a corpse, and a soul without body is a ghost,”2 and is under nο circumstances “man” or the full truth of man. This is the very reason that, in the doctrine of our Creed, we “look for the resurrection of the dead”; more ancient Creeds speak of “flesh” or “bodies.” Any rest that Christians may obtain in the notion of an immortality of the soul and any attenuation of the expectation of bodily resurrection—which, alas, is all too common among Christians—is but deviation from the truth of man, and thus heresy. (b) If this is where the matter stands in respect of the truth of man, then we cannot say that man has a body; we can only say that he is a body. This means that the body is an element of his truth, of his being and identity. And if this is so, then man in the truth of his being is inextricably bound to his natural environment. For how might one conceive of the human body without the rest of material creation? Those who believe that ultimately the human body will be resurrected, but that the material world will not survive, certainly have a mythical, unreal body in mind. Methodius of Olympus maintained, in combating Origen, that it cannot be possible that God will resurrect bodies unless He saves material creation in its entirety. As we shall see, this point is particularly connected with the ecological problem. Any scientific and technological attainment that, in respect of knowledge, abrogates or weakens the role of the body contravenes not merely ethics, but the truth—namely, the ontology of man. (c) Precisely because of such an indissoluble and ontological relation of man with his body, and through this with his natural environment, the Church Fathers describe man as a “microcosm” that contains the “macrocosm” and links, by means of his body, the material with the intelligible. It is

Cf. Georges Florovsky, “Redemption,” in Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3 (Nordland-Belmont, MA, 1976), 106. 2

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not accidental that, in order to save man, the Son and Logos of God, became “flesh”—that is, took upon Himself the element of man that links him to his natural environment. If the truth of man were to be found in his soul, then He would only assume a human soul. By taking a human body, then, He demonstrated that man is inconceivable without his body and that He did not come only to save man but all of creation. There can be no greater requirement for our concern for the protection of the natural environment. (d) These considerations prove man’s organic link with—one might even call it dependency οn—his physical environment. The fact the man does not “have” a body but “is” a body denotes that, without his natural environment, man himself ceases to be; the truth of man is inextricably bound with all of material creation. This truth is founded οn the fact that man was created by God at the end of creation and only after the creation of the material world as well as all the animal kingdom had preceded his. It is typical that in Gnostic systems man appears before the material and animal kingdoms are created. Ιn Holy Scripture the reverse is the case. This declares man’s dependence from all of preceding creation and especially from the animal kingdom. The theory of evolution presents no problems for theology from such an aspect. On the contrary, it is welcome insofar as it proves that man is indivisibly bound with the rest of material creation, as well as insofar intelligence— of which he is boastful, and whereby he subjugates and exploits material creation—does not constitute an exclusive attribute found only in man, but only a difference in degree (and not kind) from other animals. The theory of evolution, in its serious rather than its risible aspect (which includes descent from apes, and such like), is concerned not with “who” created the world, but with “how” the world was created; only a confusion between these two questions, arising from a “fundamentalist” reading of the Scriptures, could perceive such a scientific theory as posing a threat to the Christian faith. A careful study of St. Basil’s Homilies on the Hexaemeron is persuasive as to the evolutionary creation of species. Theology and biology have nο cause to engage in disputes over this matter.

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(e) Nevertheless, the fact that man appears at the end of creation is not just restricted to the implication—readily acknowledged by all environmentalists—that man is dependent on his natural environment. The adjunct that environmentalists seem to have difficulty accepting wholeheartedly is that the natural environment also has need of man in order to exist. The reason they do not accept this is historical: if at some point, according both to evolution theory and to the Scriptures, all the other species existed without man, then they can also exist in the future without him. On this point, Orthodox theology takes a different view: material nature exists in order to reach its culmination in man, the crown of all creation according to the Church Fathers. St. Maximus, in particular, identifies man par excellence (or true man) with Christ, and insists that everything created predicates man. Without man all of creation falls apart. Ontology, the truth of creation, is not historical (protological), but teleological (eschatological). And within the ultimate truth of the created world lies man. This patristic view springs to mind when we find ourselves before contemporary theories in physics and cosmology, such as for instance that of the so-called anthropic principle. Ιn the prologue to The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,3 the classic work by J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tippler, we read: “It is not only that man is adapted to the universe. The universe is adapted to man. Imagine Universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percent one-way or the other. Man could never come into being in such a universe.” That is the central point of the anthropic principle. According tο this principle, a lifegiving factor lies at the center of the whole machinery and design of the world. “What is man that you take thought of him?” All was done for the sake of this prince of creation. Science agrees here with theology; but science tells us that this world will end and with it so will man. Is there here a meeting point between theology and science?

3

Oxford University Press; Revised edition, 1988.

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For ancient Greek philosophy a final destruction of the world is inconceivable. The world is eternal; “the whole world is filled with gods”—time is recycled, like the stars—and nothing can destroy it. A similar attitude is also found in oriental religions. Only the Judeo-Christian tradition sees the world in its entirety as finite and contingent, precisely because it believes that it had a beginning, that at some point it did not exist, and therefore it stands to reason that it can cease to exist eventually. In fact, patristic theology developed the idea that the world was created ex nihilo and therefore it does not possess the forces of immortality and eternity within its nature. At this point patristic theology propounds the immense significance of man for the survival of the world. Man is delegated with the responsibility for the survival of creation. This is the salient difference between the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and other religions: the world is fragile, its survival is not to be presumed nor taken for granted, man holds the fate of a vulnerable world within his hands. Such a view seems like undiluted humanism. Cannot God save the world οn His own, without man? Of course He can; but He does not wish to, nor will He ever save the world without the free consent and cooperation of man. This is proven by the Incarnation (enanthropesis) of God: only by becoming man does God save the world according to the Christian faith. This is a theological humanism with vast implications for ecology. It is not possible, under any circumstances, for man to be relieved of his responsibility to protect and cherish nature. Thus man may pursue his freedom in two modes: either as freedom from nature or as freedom for nature. Ιn the first of these modes, man is cut off from nature, forgetting that he does not have a body but is a body. In this regard, man develops his intellectual prowess to the point of abrogating his body—caught up in the grip of a pure, computer or internet-type intelligence (whether stronger or weaker)—and of course remains indifferent to his natural environment or destroys it wantonly. In the second mode—that is, of freedom not from nature but for nature, man acknowledges that he holds in his hands a fragile and precious gift, rendering thanks to the Giver for this gift and bringing it before Him as Eucharist—cherishing it and caring for it not as its overlord but as one entrusted with the responsibility for its survival, as a god by gracious dispensation.

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Conclusion The ecological crisis is not solely, nor even predominantly, a moral problem. It does not only result from prosperity, individualism, consumerism, and so on, but principally from the distortion of man’s identity: namely, from man having forgotten what he is. In other words, man has forgotten that he is an organic part of the rest of the world—forgotten that he is body and that it is impossible to body without being organically linked with the material world surrounding him. The responsibility of religions, and equally of science, in respect of this point is immense. The former because it has often caused man to believe that he is a spiritual entity that merely has a body and that may therefore be conceived of without it. The latter because it precipitously cultivates intelligence as a function independent of the material body, often subjugating the material world by means of technology. It is not accidental that in the contemporary world of globalization and of ecological crisis, technology is playing such a decisive role. Theology and science must jointly promote the truth of the significance of the body; they must both valiantly resist a “civilization” that posits man’s nature in his intelligence or his spirituality. Man’s freedom does not remove his corporality; it does not estrange him from his natural environment. Were this to happen, man would cease to be man. Perhaps the most horrible consequence of the ecological crisis is not so much the destruction of the environment but the destruction of the concept of man. The environment may only be preserved if the true concept of man is preserved.

6 An Orthodox Response to the Environmental Challenge

Introduction It would be difficult to find anyone nowadays who would doubt the alarming assertion that our natural environment is being dangerously polluted and destroyed. Absorbed as we are, however, in the political, social, and economic problems which for many years now have dominated our current concerns, we do not appreciate that around us a progressive disaster is taking place which will eventually destroy us all and with us perhaps every form of life on our planet. Had we been fully aware of the insidious catastrophe that is overtaking us, we would perhaps long before now have transformed the contents of our newspapers and news bulletins. Perhaps even the sermons delivered in our churches and the syllabi taught in our schools would have taken a different line. Perhaps, in other words, we would have seriously rethought the order of our priorities in every department of life. The slow pace at which the seriousness of the problem of the protection of nature is being brought to the awareness of the public in our days also extends to the Christian Church. Unfortunately there are many who ask: “Why should we Christians concern ourselves with the so-called ‘ecological crisis’?” There are fundamentally two categories of Christians who think in this way. First, there are those who believe that the aim of the Church of Christ is the salvation of souls alone; everything material is for them secondary if not actually a hindrance to the soul’s salvation.

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For such Christians the material world is transitory and destined to be replaced in the Kingdom of God by a world which is immaterial and spiritual. The second category of Christians indifferent to the ecological crisis is made up of those who believe that the problem is in its nature political, scientific and technological. What business have the Church and theology with this subject? Let politicians and scientists deal with it. The Church and theology have another kind of work to do. Accordingly, this discussion would be regarded by many as superfluous, if not actually extraneous to the Orthodox tradition. It is therefore necessary for us Orthodox, along with all Christians, to examine the reasons why the nightmarish seriousness of this problem should be of concern to us too, to our witness and our mission. It is especially incumbent upon us Orthodox to take this problem seriously and set it among our most urgent priorities. It is vital for us to understand that, if we do not do something of this kind, then we are responsible in the sight of God for the most unforgivable negligence and sin. In this chapter, I shall attempt to analyze briefly the following basic propositions: (a) The roots of our ecological crisis are bound up with certain forms of the Christian tradition. (b) The problem in consequence has the most serious spiritual and religious dimensions and cannot be resolved unless there is some change in the manner in which we conceive of the relationship between humanity, God and the world. (c) Orthodoxy has a certain understanding of the relationship between humanity and God and humanity and the world which can perhaps help us confront the problem.

The Roots of the Ecological Crisis An American historian, Lynn Townsend White,1 writing as early as 1967 about the historical roots of the ecological problem, was categorical in attributing prime responsibility for it to Christian

1

See “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” 1203–7.

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theology. Western theology, with its rationalistic concept of humanity, has brought matters to the present crisis. Independently of any reservations which one could express with regard to a thesis of this kind, some elements from the history of Christian thought confirm it. I shall attempt to indicate them briefly. (a) Under the influence of Platonism, and especially the Neoplatonism of the period of the first Christian centuries, the concept developed that the material world is at best unrelated to the final destiny of humanity and at worst identical with evil. The latter understanding was that of the Gnostics whom the Church declared heretical and expelled from its bosom, chiefly under the influence of a great theologian of the second century, St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons. The mild form of Gnosticism, however, that which regarded the material world as indifferent to the final destiny of humanity and somewhat inferior in relation to the world of souls, spirits and the incorporeal angels, passed finally into the Christian tradition. The main bearers of this development were the Christian Gnostic writers of Alexandria at the end of the second and the beginning of the third centuries, Clement and Origen, who exercised a decisive influence on a large part of the Christian tradition both in the East and in the West. Origen, for example, was widely read in monastic circles in Egypt, while in the West he was one of the most important influences on St. Augustine. It was necessary for powerful spiritual and theological forces to be brought to bear on Eastern monasticism, such as the influence of the monastic tradition which bears the name of St. Macarius of Egypt and also of St. Maximus the Confessor, who in the seventh century undertook a deep and discerning correction of Origenism, for the Byzantine tradition to be saved from these concepts. In the West, however, St. Augustine was the dominant figure in theology and matters took a different turn, as we shall now see. (b) In the West, under the influence of St. Augustine, man was defined principally as that being which thinks and is conscious of itself and the world. The essence of humanity is found in the capacity for thought and self-awareness.

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Only human beings within the material creation think and are self-aware and for this reason transcend other beings. The sacraments of the Church, such as baptism, the Divine Eucharist, and so on, do not have as their aim the sanctification of the material creation but constitute means for the preservation of the soul. For in the Kingdom of Heaven, according to St. Augustine, only souls will exist and that which counts is their salvation. This way of looking at man principally through the refracting glass of his spiritual powers, and above all of his capacity for thought and self-awareness, laid the foundations of modern Western civilization. Of decisive significance for the modern way of thinking was the Enlightenment, the roots of which must be sought in the theological tradition of St. Augustine. Thus: (i) The well-known saying of the scientist and philosopher, Descartes, “cogito ergo sum” extends the thought of Augustine to encompass the definition of a human being: I am that which I think, and therefore I cease to exist if I do not think. Thinking beings are the only ones which in the final analysis are of value, and for this reason the material creation has no other aim than to serve thought, that is to say, humanity. Mathematics, to which Descartes made an important contribution, and the natural sciences generally have according to this philosopher one purpose, namely, to make us masters of the material nature and the material nature our servant. Descartes’s words at this point are revealing in relation to our theme. With the progress of the sciences “one should be able,” he says, “to discover a method by which, knowing the power and energies of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies which surround us as well as we know the different techniques of our craftsmen, we would be able to apply them in the same way to all the uses appropriate to them and thus become masters and owners (maîtres et possesseurs) of nature.”2

Cf. Discours de la méthode, Texte et commentaire E. Gilson (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1947), 6lff. 2

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(ii) On this basis there developed very quickly in the West the assumption that the purpose of science was utilitarian. At this juncture the contribution of British empiricism was decisive. According to empiricist thinking only that which strikes the senses is real and consequently the whole of material nature is judged ultimately by that which man collects through his senses. But this anthropocentrism was not restricted to empiricism. Other forms of the Enlightenment, such as the French and the German, saw the material creation as a means of attaining sensory gratification and pleasure. The material world exists for man’s satisfaction and he gains his pleasure in various ways, aesthetically, sensuously and even “spiritually”— indeed, man has no other destiny. Here too lie the roots of the headlong development of modern technology. (iii) Within this utilitarian spirit which is created by the concept that man surpasses the other beings in the material world by reason of his intellect and his capacity for self-awareness, there also developed the modern sociological ideas which contributed in their way to the appearance of the ecological problem. The human capacity to organize all things in a rational way, so as to produce from every activity some useful and beneficial result, has led to the rapid development of the economies of the Western world on the basis of the pursuit of gain. When the increase of production becomes an end in itself and our rational powers are mobilized for its attainment, we have the phenomenon of the exploitation of natural resources to an infinite degree—a very marked characteristic of modern Western communities. Perhaps Max Weber’s theory that capitalism has its roots in Calvinism does not absolutely fit the facts. Nevertheless, it appears to be historically true that the way in which the passages from Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply and you will have dominion over the earth” (Gen. 1:28) and “Let us make man in our own image and after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and

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over all the earth” (Gen. 1:26) were interpreted and presented by Protestant preachers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led precisely to an unchallenged and uncontrolled exploitation of the material world by humanity. Thus our ecological problem appears to be not unrelated to the history of Christian theology. It is a problem with the deepest theological and spiritual roots and for this reason should concern all who serve the Church today.

Spiritual Implications of the Ecological Problem From the brief review which I have made of an aspect of the history of Christian thought certain elements emerge which constitute the religious and spiritual dimension of the ecological problem. These I would summarize in the following way: 1. The isolation and exaltation of the rational element in humanity, that is to say, the rationalistic approach to truth and reality. The theological side of this phenomenon lies in the conception that the characteristic of being “in the image of God” which was given to humanity at creation lies in our rational element as a capacity for thought. This concept is very old in patristic literature, as is the related idea that in the whole material creation only human beings are endowed with “reason,” while the animals are “irrational.” The problem, however, lies in what precisely we mean by the term “reason.” Originally, as the term was used by the Pre-Socratic philosophers and in accordance with its Sanskrit root (le), it appears to have meant the power of the collection of scattered beings into a single unity, that is, the creation of a cosmos, of a single unified and harmonious unity. With their reason human beings create unities, a cosmos, from the existent things within nature, which otherwise remain without meaning. In ancient Greek thought, which was profoundly aesthetic, reason was linked with harmony, order and beauty, an approach which was later transferred to the political life of Athens and

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also to moral behavior—that is, to living and behaving “in accordance with reason.” This concept underwent basic changes in the development of philosophy and lost its ancient link with order, harmony and beauty. With the restriction, as we saw earlier, of the distinguishing difference in man to his capacity for thought “reason” came to mean “rationality,” that is to say, a purely intellectual activity. When, of course, this capacity was tied to the production of results, rationality led directly to technology and even more specifically to technocracy. Thus was created a technocratic ethos, which consists in seeing the world as an object, which acts on the human mind and directs it toward useful goals. The ecological problem is not the result of any identification of the image of God in human beings with reason, but of the specific conception that “reason” means an intellectual activity with which humanity uses nature as an object, which obliges it to produce useful results. This entails a certain mentality, a certain attitude on the part of humanity and consequently a certain ethos. The ecological problem cannot be solved unless human beings cease to confine the “reason” which they have to their capacity for thought, that is to say, unless they see the world as a harmonious and unified whole and not as a set of useful and productive pieces. 2. The individualistic view of human beings and of existent things generally. This problem is directly linked with the previous one because it is related to the human tendency to cut up the world into pieces, to take it apart first so that in consequence it can be put together again in useful unities which yield productive results. Thus instead of seeing both themselves and every other being in an organic relationship with each other, human beings see all things as individuals, including themselves. One result of this attitude is the myth that a particular person can be a center of existence, that is to say, that whole world can turn around the axis of their individuality and become their servant. Instead of finding their identity in relationship with other beings they find the identity of other beings in relationship with themselves. As we have already seen, in theological language this is called

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the “Fall” because in the story of the Fall of Adam the dominant element is the self-proclamation of man as “God,” that is, as the ultimate point of reference for the matter of creation. Human beings thus divide up not only creation but also their own nature. From having been a comprehensive idea Adam becomes a fragmented one, and thus are born sin and death, which are nothing other than the fragmentation of the world and of humanity itself into separate entities. This concept of human beings as individuals creates problems for their coexistence with other human beings on the social level. The same difficulty also arises on the level of the relationship of human beings with their natural environment. All people see themselves as the center of the universe and in order to subordinate the natural environment to their own aims and desires they divide it, too, into individual pieces. Next, for this fragmentation to become more profitable, it is made composite with the help of the laws of rational thought and thus on the social level there appears collectivism and on the ecological level the technocratic dominance of technology. The supremacy of the individual consequently lies at the root of the ecological problem. 3. A joint spiritual and moral problem closely linked with the supremacy of the individual is the eudemonistic concept of life. The search for individual happiness becomes an “individual right.” This means that every human being has the right to use the material world with the aim of securing the happiness of the individual or the group, which on the social level creates a conflict of claims to the allocation and enjoyment of resources with a complete neglect of the consequences which these individual or group claims will have for the natural environment. The ecological problem thus becomes a matter concerning an ethos and a mentality, a question of a spiritual attitude with regard to the world. The eudemonism of contemporary humanity feeds the ecological crisis. All this and much else that could also be put forward means that the ecological problem has the most profound spiritual dimensions and cannot be solved without a fundamental repentance on the part of humanity, that is to say, without a review of the whole relationship of humanity

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with the material world. Christian theology, which, as we have seen, bears a large portion of the blame for the emergence of the ecological problem, must contribute to the creation of a new human attitude to creation as a whole, to give it the value which belongs to it and to set humanity in a correct relationship with it. Thus the question arises: What could be the contribution of Orthodoxy to such an endeavor? What kind of view of the material world and of humanity does Orthodoxy have and how can this contribute to the creation of a new ethos which will exalt the natural environment and view it in the right way? Let us now turn to these questions.

Man’s Relationship with the Natural Environment When we speak of the Orthodox tradition we have two things in view. The first is theology, as formulated by the Fathers of the Church; the second is the experience of the Church, as lived by the saints and by the entire body of the Church. In essence these two constitute a unified reality, because for Orthodox theology a purely intellectual activity does not exist. Theology is always interpreted as living experience. These two things, theology and experience, are intertwined: the one expresses and interprets the other. From Orthodox theology, as it was shaped by the Fathers of the Church in fidelity to Holy Scripture, we may isolate for our theme two basic teachings, one concerning the creation and nature of the material world and the other the mission of humankind within creation. Let us turn our attention to these two points before we attempt to see how they are expressed and lived in the life of the Orthodox Church.

I. The Creation and Nature of the Material World The world which surrounds us, that which we call nature as a whole, is not for us something which is intelligible in itself or self-explanatory. In order to understand and define its nature we

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have to resort to something outside it; we have to seek the cause of its existence in something fundamentally other than the world. This means that the world owes its existence to some other cause without which it would not have existed. The search for a creator which would have explained the provenance of the world has always been a primary issue in philosophy and religious thought. The ways in which this search was satisfied at various times may be summarized as follows: (a) The material world is the result of an unfortunate and, for the most part, evil energy, of some cause which can have no relationship with the good. This proposition depends on the observation that corruption and death pervade the whole of the material creation and consequently one can only expect evil from it. It is a proposition that was taken up preeminently by Gnosticism in the first centuries of the Church, thus fundamentally separating the world from God and searching for salvation outside the material creation. In such a case the destruction of the material world does not constitute a problem; on the contrary, it is a blessing. (b) This world is good but only to the degree in which it participates essentially in another world that is spiritual and immaterial. Such a participation guarantees the world its eternity: the material world always has existed and always will exist, since it is inconceivable without its organic bond with God and with the spiritual world. As long as God has existed and will exist and an incorruptible spiritual world has existed and will exist, so long has the world existed and will exist. In such a case, which was represented chiefly by ancient Greek philosophy, the destruction of the material world is inconceivable—that is to say, it does not constitute a problem and consequently no anxiety is justified. A similar thesis has been developed by various Eastern religions, for which the destruction of the natural environment is evil and is to be condemned but can in no way be considered fundamental in an ontological sense since the world was not created in time but is “created” continuously within an eternal cycle. (c) This world had a beginning in the absolute sense of “there was a time when it was not” and consequently it

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is threatened with annihilation, since in its nature it is not eternal. This thesis finds expression in the Christian doctrine of the creation of the world out of nothing (ex nihilo) in the absolutely ontological meaning of the word. In such a case if the world is to survive it cannot have recourse to powers which are found within its own nature, since in its nature it is not eternal but mortal and dependent on the will of Him who brought it into existence. Consequently, in order for it to live, the world is obliged to be in uninterrupted communion with its Creator. Any break in this communion signifies the annihilation of the world, if not automatically at least finally. This is the position of the patristic teaching on the creation of the world. In accordance to this teaching, the following two principles are implied: 1. First, that the world cannot survive by necessity, that is to say with the help of laws which exist within its nature, even if it is thought that these laws were put into the world by the Creator himself, because something of this kind would have indicated that in creating the world God created something that is by nature eternal and of necessity immortal, that is to say, another “God.” The survival of the world is consequently a matter not of necessity but of freedom. We shall explain here what this means. 2. Second, that God, who of his own free will brought the world into existence, since he willed the world to exist, cannot but will its permanent existence, since it does not befit an eternal God to change what he has originally willed—“the gifts of God are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:29). We thus have a somewhat complicated picture which sets out the attitude of the Church toward nature and the destiny of the material world. On the one hand this world as the product of the will of God and not of his nature is naturally mortal and subject to annihilation; on the other it is destined to go on existing precisely because it does spring from the will of God, not on account of power hidden within it but on account of its free relationship and communion with God. At this point we encounter the vast significance of human existence.

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II. The Creation and Mission of Humanity Why was humanity created? What is our relationship with the rest of the material creation? What is our destiny? These questions are directly connected with our theme, and unless we have a correct approach toward them we cannot properly respond to the ecological problem. The relevant biblical data which we have at our disposal and which constitute the basis of the patristic understanding of humanity are primarily the following: the first is that human beings were brought into being at the end after the whole world was created and were formed out of matter from the material creation. The second is that God created human beings “in his image and likeness.” These two elements led the Fathers of the Church to the idea that humanity constitutes a link between God and the material world, embodying as it were in a “microcosm” the whole material creation and uniting it with God. Consequently, we should be able to say that human beings were created in order to unite in their person the material world with God and thus enable them to live forever. This is the destiny of humanity, which makes us more important even than the angels, since the latter do not participate in the material creation. From this thesis it becomes apparent that for us to understand our place in creation we must not forget two things: that we are an organic part of the material creation and cannot be conceived of without it—that is to say, if the material creation is destroyed we are also destroyed—and that we are made “in the image of God,” bearing within the material creation characteristics which belong to God, so that creation may be able to have communion with God and thus live forever. The shocking general conclusion of this understanding is that neither can humanity survive without the natural environment, nor—and this point is not usually adverted to by the environmentalists—can the natural environment survive without humanity. This assertion perhaps appears strange considering that the natural environment has existed for so many eons without us. But if we regard the material creation neither statically, nor simply historically, but dynamically, teleologically and eschatologically (which also implies eternal survival), the final destiny of the material creation is united irrevocably with humanity. The world was created for humanity and humanity for the world.

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Perhaps the recent theory of the “anthropic principle” in physics contains much truth. Independently of this, however, the whole understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature which Orthodoxy brings with it cannot, I think, see the survival of the world except in relation to that of human beings. Our destiny is to lead the material world to eternity. In what manner? Of vital significance at this point is the concept of humanity as made in the image of God. To what does the expression “in the image” refer? To the rational element? But in what sense? To the aspect of sovereignty? But with what significance? To the aspect of self-determination? But how should we understand it? All these meanings, as we saw earlier, are found in the Christian tradition, but the way in which they were understood has unfortunately contributed to the appearance of the ecological problem. We must consequently review them once again. We have much in common with the animals, which constitute our biological “family” within creation, as the science of biology accepts, but we also have something which differentiates us. This is not the rational element in the sense of the syllogisms and mechanics of thought or of self-awareness. These, as Charles Darwin convincingly showed, are also found among the animals— it is a question of difference of degree, not of kind. That which appears to differentiate human beings radically from the animals is that the latter use “reason” to adapt themselves to the environment, discovering its laws with an often surprising intelligence, whereas we are not satisfied with adapting ourselves to the laws of nature but wish to create our own world. Uniting in this way the “rational” aspect with the “sovereign” and “autonomous” aspects—elements which in the patristic tradition constitute our creation “in the image”—we are led to the power of creating, which is perhaps the quintessence of being “in the image.” Consequently as image of God we take into our hands the material world, our natural environment, not in order to leave it as it is but to transform it “into form and beauty” and to set on it our personal seal. It is precisely this human ability that constitutes a two-edged sword with regard to the ecology, since with this ability we can refashion the natural environment in order to use it for ourselves or we can refashion it in order to bring it into communion with God. In the first case we confine nature to the boundaries of decay, while in the second we liberate it from this and becomes its “priest,” offering it to its God

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and savior and giving eternal meaning to things otherwise subject to decay and the passage of time. All these perhaps appear to be theoretical conceptions without practical application. Modern people demand action and results and that is why we have placed almost all our hopes with regard to the ecological problem in political action. Perhaps I may be allowed to cast doubt on this mentality and for two basic reasons. The first is that in reality all these things which are listened to as theories have been tested in history and have been proved to be applicable. In the Orthodox tradition this has happened in the following ways: (a) On the level of worship, matter and the material world were not only not disregarded or rejected so that worship should supposedly become more “spiritual,” but were inserted organically into the body of worship. The Orthodox faithful traditionally go to church bearing with them the gifts of creation and the fruits of their labor—bread, oil, water, wine and often fruit as well as other natural products—for them to be blessed and offered to the Creator as thankofferings and to be embodied in the body of Christ which is consecrated on the altar. The utilization of matter, of colors, of lights, of incense, and so on, is all directed toward showing that man cannot clothe himself in isolation from his natural environment and that his destiny is to take with him to the Kingdom of God the whole of his natural environment. Only recently has a wave of pietism which has invaded the Orthodox world begun to change this mentality of the Orthodox faithful. The return to tradition is not easy but the Church has a duty to do everything possible to enable the faithful again to unite their worship in an organic way with the natural environment. (b) Outside the realm of worship, in everyday life, Orthodox believers have historically created a culture which in essence consists in the application of the theological principles which I have just analyzed. Architecture, on which we shall hear an address at the round table, is a prime example of how matter (stone, clay, and so on) passes through the hands of a believer, in one respect to “tie in” harmoniously with the natural environment, in another to be transformed

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into an instrument of communion with man and with God. In fact, in every cultural expression the natural environment can be borne in mind and its role can become holy in human life. History proves that this is not beyond attainment. (c) In a special but vital area of the Orthodox tradition, that of monastic life, on which again there will be a special address at the round table, the theological “theories” which I discussed a little earlier have been lived in an impressive manner. Orthodox monasticism has cultivated a type and manner of humanity which has developed the most tender, the most sacred relationship with the natural environment. It has produced a kind of person who has acquired such sensitivity to pain that he becomes effusive toward the animals, so that he weeps with them when they suffer or when they die, so that he lives with them in harmony. Orthodox monasticism does not constitute a model and prototype of general application. My reference to it here does not have as its aim an invitation to the modern world to enter a monastery. Its significance lies in its being raised up in history as a proof, if not by all at least by a few, that the theology of human relations with nature can become a mode of existence. Those who live in the world have other ways of showing their sensitivity to material nature, ways inspired, as I have said, by worship and other forms of culture. But there is also another reason why the theological propositions which I have discussed are not without practical significance. At this point one should perhaps review some very basic concepts and prepare for much longer-term solutions that require much patience.

Resolving the Ecological Problem One solution or method is for us to pass legislation forbidding activities which harm the natural environment. But if such legislation is enacted through democratic means, as we would all wish it to be, it requires the consent of the people. On my way to the Greek island of Crete, I heard on the radio that the Greek

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government is preparing, unwillingly and with regret but apparently out of necessity, to allow the resumption of industry in a region of Attica where for environmental reasons it had been banned. The reason for this was the representations of citizens who had lost their jobs through the closure of the factories. The political solution of the ecological problem is impossible without a deeper change in people’s mentality. The same is true for the moral solution. To put it into moral rules which will be taught in schools is useful. But people do not obey moral rules without some internal nucleus and without their free consent. The moral solution in order to be applied presupposes an interior transformation so as to be received freely by people. The successful confrontation of the ecological problem thus continues in every eventuality to be a matter of ethos rather than moral rules, a matter of mentality and attitudes toward the world and God rather than the application of law. Perhaps with regard to any other subject the significance of the Church would not be so vital as it is with regard to the ecological problem. In the Church a person becomes habituated even from early childhood to taking up an attitude toward his environment, both natural and social. There he will learn to revere and honor matter, in the phrase of St. John of Damascus, as an organic element of his relationship with God. A Church which has expelled matter from worship—or infants from worship because they disturb the “spirituality” of the adults— cannot expect to have people who place the natural environment on an equal footing with regard to its destiny and value with their own persons. The Church must be right-minded toward all these in order to become a place where humanity becomes accustomed to a new ethos. The Orthodox Church should take note of this because it has neglected it much for a supposedly more spiritual or ethical religious sentiment. Modern Western people faced with the ecological crisis appear to veer between the use of the rational faculty—that is, the ethics of balance and the mean—on the one hand and the denial of reason through a mysticism which leads to the worship of nature on the other. The United Nations and other international organizations try to rally the major faiths to a common front against the destruction of the natural environment. Orthodoxy has her own presuppositions and special insights on this subject. These I have tried to describe and present here to the reader. With these, Orthodoxy, far from

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taking up any haughty attitude in relation to others, desires in her own way to contribute to the alleviation of the severe crisis which humanity confronts in common. With what I have outlined in this chapter, I wish above all to raise the awareness of the Orthodox themselves with regard to the seriousness of the problem and to remind them humbly of the strengths which our tradition conceals for the creation of the ethos which is required for humanity to escape from this crisis. If from this tradition there emerges something useful for others for the effort which they too are making in relation to the same common problem, then this modest contribution will perhaps have been worth the patience of the reader.



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

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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 nineteenthcentury 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

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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 “worldview” (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

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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

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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

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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

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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 owing 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

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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 defined the human being in terms of reason and intellect, introducing consciousness and introspectiveness as the supreme aspects of human, and indeed divine, existence. Thus the human being was singled out from created nature as being not only a higher kind of being, but in fact the sole being that mattered eternally—apart, of course, from the angels who, owing to their spiritual and immaterial existence, were of an even higher value than human souls. The Kingdom of God in St. Augustine’s vision of the last things has no place at all for nature; it consists of the survival of spiritual beings, the eternal souls. The Church was thus gradually losing its awareness of the importance and value of the material creation, and this was particular evident in the way that it treated the sacraments and the Eucharist in particular. Instead of being a blessing over the material world, the fruit of nature, and a reference of it with gratitude and dedication to the Creator, the Eucharist soon became primarily a memorial service of the sacrifice of Christ and a means of grace for the nourishment of the soul. The dimension of the cosmos soon

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disappeared from sacramental theology in the West, giving way to a soul- or spirit-centered worldview. 3. The Middles Ages and the Reformation did little to change this situation, having in fact reinforced through Scholasticism the idea that the imago Dei consists in the reason of man. The sacraments remained to a large extent in the West irrelevant to the material world, while the gap between man and nature widened still further. Descartes, following the Augustinian tradition, rendered the thinking subject the center of everything (cogito ergo sum). The Enlightenment strengthened even further the view that the thinking rational being is all that matters in existence. Romanticism, while paying attention to nature, reinforced the dichotomy between the conscious thinking subject and the nonthinking nonconscious nature, clearly giving superiority to the former and allowing the latter to be of value only in so far as it contained in itself the presence of the former. Pietism, mysticism, as well as other religious and theological movements still operated without any reference to nature, while Puritanism and mainstream Calvinism exploited to the utmost the Genesis verses urging man to “multiply and to dominate earth,” thereby giving rise to capitalism and eventually to modern technology and our present-day civilization.

Modern Times To this man-centered and reason-dominated worldview to which Christian theology has contributed, our modern Western world managed to produce two intellectual forces that acted as “antibodies”—both however outside the area of theology and the Church, which remained in great part even hostile to these forces. 1. The first of these was Darwinism. A blessing in disguise, we might call it. Darwinism pointed out the human being is by no means the only intelligent being in creation—a blow to the Scholastic view that the image of God in man is contained solely in his reason and intellect—and that consciousness, even self-consciousness, is to be found in

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animals, too, the difference between them and man being one of the degree, not of kind. Thus man was thrown back to his organic place in nature, while the question remained open as to what constitutes his difference from the animals, given now the fact that reason is no longer the special difference. By defending its reason-centered culture, the Church failed to respond constructively to the challenge of Darwinism and preferred either to enter into antagonistic battle with it, or else to succumb to it. In fact, by accepting its downward looking anthropology, it invariably refused to seek in areas other than reason the difference of the human being. But Darwinism, having virtually won the science of biology, is still there, and theology has to make the best use of it—both positively and negatively—not least for the sake of overcoming the ecological crisis. 2. The second set of antibodies to this inherited man-centered and reason-dominated culture of ours came in modern times from the area of natural philosophy through Einstein and the subsequent schools of modern quantum physics. Here the blow was of a different and perhaps deeper kind. In the first instances it signified the end of a dichotomy between nature (or substance) and event. Everything that is at the same time happens; space and time coincide with one another. The world itself is an event and therefore cannot be conceived apart from an act, one might say a ritual that takes place all the time. In addition, we have the blow to the subject-object structure dealt by quantum mechanics. The observer and the observed form an unbreakable unity, with the one influencing the other. The universe in its remotest parts is present in every single part of it. Even what is called by a certain school of natural philosophy “the anthropic principle” in spite of its anthropocentrism cannot apply to the world view in which man is isolated from the rest of the universe. Natural science as well as biology press hard on theology in our time demanding a review of our traditional theology. I believe that this pressure can be of decisive benefit to the Church in its attempt to face the ecological problem. This, however, presupposes a creative

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use of all the new developments in the areas of the biology and natural sciences in connection with whatever Christian tradition can offer for the same purpose. Such elements from the Christian tradition can be drawn from the diverse areas of classical theology, especially from that of the patristic era.

Lecture II: Positive Elements from Tradition 1. From the liturgical experience of the ancient Church, the following elements must be underlined: (a) All ancient liturgies, especially in the East, involve a sanctification of matter and time. There is no introspective and self-conscious attitude of the human soul in the ancient liturgies. Everything was aimed at the involvement of the praying individual in an event of communion with the other members of the worshipping community and with the material context of the liturgy. Apart from the bread and the wine, which themselves comprise part of the material world, the ancient liturgies tried to involve all of man’s senses in the liturgical event: the eyes through the icons and the liturgical vestments, the ears through the hymns and psalmody, the nose through the smell of incense, and so on, in addition to the prayer “for seasonable weather” and “for an abundance of the fruits of the earth,” etc., all of which place the liturgy right in the heart of creation. (b) All ancient liturgies seem to be centered not so much on the consecration of elements, even less so on a psychological anamnesis (or commemoration) of the cross of Christ, but on the lifting up of the gifts of bread and wine to the Creator Father, in what the ancient Greek liturgies call the anaphora (or lifting up). Liturgists today tend to stress this forgotten detail, which can be of particular significance for a theology of

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creation. For it attaches at least equal centrality—if not greater importance—to man’s act as priest of creation as it does to God’s act of sending down the Holy Spirit to transform the offered gifts into the Body and Blood of Christ. This forgotten aspect was so central in the consciousness of the early Church as to lend itself to identify and name the entire Eucharistic service or event. The whole service was called Anaphora or Eucharistia to indicate man’s priestly action as representative of creation. In this connection it must also be underlined that all ancient Eucharistic liturgies began their Eucharistic prayer or canon with thanksgiving for creation in the first place, and only afterwards for redemption through Christ. In certain cases, like that of the Eucharistic liturgy commented on by St. Cyril of Jerusalem in his Mystagogical Catecheses, the thanksgiving for creation seems to be the only point of the Eucharistic canon with no mention at all of the sacrifice of Christ. Of course this was not the norm, but it can serve as an illustration of how central the reference to creation was in the ancient liturgies. The priestly aspect of the Eucharist did not consist in the notion of sacrifice, as it came to be understood in the Middle Ages, but in that of offering back to God His own creation. It is a great pity, indeed, that sacrificial notions came to occupy the meaning of priesthood for centuries, for this has meant the loss of the dimension of creation from the notion of priesthood. It is important to recover this perspective in order to face our ecological problem properly. 2. A second area in which the ancient Church can help us recreate our theology today is that of asceticism. Here things need some explanation, for asceticism has normally been associated with hostility or, in the best of cases, with contempt toward the material world. However, with the exception of those monastic trends that derived from Origenism, asceticism was not normally associated with neglect or disdain of the material creation. In the earliest Gerontikon—the collection of Sayings of the Desert Fathers—we encounter ascetics who wept over the death of birds or who lived in peace with wild animals. Even today on Mount Athos one can encounter monks who coexist

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peacefully with snakes and insects. Besides this respect for nature, it must be noted that it was in the circles of the desert theologians especially that the idea developed in the East that the “image of God” in man is also to be found in his body and not simply in his mind. Indeed, asceticism was accompanied in the early Church by the breaking of one’s own selfish will, so that the individual with his or her desires to dominate the external world in order to use it for their own satisfaction may learn not to conceive the individual the center of creation. This is a spirit which is needed in order to teach modern man how to solve the ecological problem. But it should not be taken as part of an ethical education, for then it would lead nowhere. It can only be meaningful if, combined the liturgical experience, it creates an ethos rather than a prescribed rule of behavior, and it is in this sense that it can be useful to theology, which in turn can be helpful in addressing the problem of our time. One could add to the list of elements borrowed from tradition many others, such as the use of space and matter in architecture, the use of color and shape in painting, or of sound and song in music. In general, as noted earlier, it is a matter of culture which theology must aim at. But for the purposes of the first part of this chapter, it may suffice to stop at this point. We have seen how history has contributed to the emergence of the ecological problem and how it can contribute to its solution. But history cannot be repeated and reconstituted intact. Nostalgic voices for a return to Byzantine forms of art are abundant today among the Orthodox. We do not intend to offer support to these voices. Our modern world has passed through changes that make a return to the past impossible and consequently undesirable. Theology today must use the past with respect; for it has indeed managed to overcome paganism without falling into Gnosticism, and it must try to learn from that. But it must try to adjust it to the present by creatively combining it with whatever our contemporary world has achieved or is trying to achieve in all areas of thought—including science, art, philosophy, and the rest. In the remaining two sections, we shall attempt to discuss in some depth certain aspects of the tradition that we believe can be of positive value in facing the ecological crisis today. We shall try to say something more about the idea of man as the priest of creation,

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as well as about how this can affect our culture. We do not of course claim for a moment that the ecological crisis will be solved as soon as our proposals end. But we hope that these modest reflections may not be altogether irrelevant to the task facing theology during these critical times of ours.

Doctrinal Overtones In the previous section, we emphasized the seriousness of the situation with which humanity, indeed our planet as a whole, are faced because of the ecological problem. In this regard, we tried to look briefly at history in order to see (a) to what extent Christian theology could be regarded as responsible for this ecological crisis; and (b) whether Christian tradition could be of help in our attempt to deal with this crisis. Our brief and inevitably generalized historical survey led us to the conclusion that Christian Church and its theology have indeed been to a large extent responsible for the emergence of the present ecological problem, but that, in spite of this, they also possess the necessary resources that can be of help to humanity in responding to and resolving this crisis. The ecological problem, therefore, although being a problem of science and therefore to a large degree of ethics, education and state legislation, is also a theological problem. As it is evident that certain theological ideas have played an important role in the creation of the problem, so it must be the case too that theological ideas can influence the course of events in the reverse direction. Theology cannot and should not be irrelevant to the creation of culture. It is unfortunate that Christian theology has in our time taken a negative view of culture and science, very much in contradiction to its fundamental claims and beliefs. And it is equally regrettable that, owing to pressures from the Enlightenment, theology and the Church have been marginalized in our Western society, as a result becoming incapable of exerting any influence either good or bad on Western culture. One would suspect that from the way things develop in our modern world, the absence of theology from our culture will be felt very deeply as science and ethics appear increasingly unable to handle situations such as the ecological problem. Without a worldview that involves what we may call a liturgical attitude to creation, it will be impossible to reverse the alarming

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situation the world is facing today. How does Christian theology view creation and man’s place in it? This is the question to which we must now address ourselves. If Christian theology has somehow led the world to the present crisis, what ideas can it now offer the world to help to deal with it? In order to answer this question, we propose to deal first with the way Christian tradition views the reality we normally call creation. This will be the task in this section. Our next step in the third and final section will concern more specifically the role that man is called to play in creation. It will then we hope be possible to draw some conclusions as to what Christian theology and the Church can offer man in the difficult crisis he is faced with in our time.

Creation of the World “Creation” is a term which, from its beginning, Christian theology found convenient for expressing its worldview. It is a term which indicates that the world is a work or product of someone, the result of a certain personal cause. The normal Greek term for creation is demiourgia, although the Christian writers of the first centuries prefer to use the term “ktisis”—a word that brings to mind craftsmanship and the building of an edifice. Now the view of the world as a “creation” by someone was not a Judeo-Christian invention. The idea was widespread at the time of the rise of Christianity that the world was created by some creator, and what the Church had to do was not so much to insist on this idea as to offer its own interpretation of it. True, there were atheists still around in the first and second centuries AD who either attributed the world to certain laws inherent in its nature and were satisfied with this explanation—these included the “physiologists,” for whom Plato intended a stiff penalty in his Laws; or else there were those who, like the Epicureans, attributed the world to pure chance. But these were negligible, almost marginalized in the intellectual milieu in which the early Church found itself, and it is for this reason that Christian writers did not bother very much about them. The main views of creation that the Church had to face and from which it was seen to disassociate itself fell into two categories. One was the Gnostic interpretation of creation, and the other was what

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we may call the Platonist or classical Greek philosophy. To these two we shall now briefly turn in order to see in what way the Christian concept of creation took its shape in this early period. Gnosticism took the view that the world in which we live is so penetrated with evil, pain, and suffering that it could not have been created by God the Father, whose goodness would never have allowed Him to create such a world. Thus in order to keep God the Father free from any responsibility for the evil that permeates the world, Gnosticism attributed creation to lowest of the intermediaries between the ineffable Father and the world. This it called the Demiourgos (literally “Creator”), and made him responsible for creation. Gnosticism believed that creation is bad by definition and had no interest in saving it, particularly in its material form. According to certain Gnostic myths, man was created before the material world was made, and so his present material state of existence constitutes his Fall. Salvation is only achieved through knowledge (gnosis), a secret knowledge of the truth taught by teachers of the Gnostic schools. It is through an escape from time and space that man can be saved. Caring for this material world is absurd and sinful. The sooner one abandons and relinquishes the material world the better. The Church took a very critical attitude to Gnosticism. Great theologians of the time, in particular St. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons at the end of the second century, wrote entire treatises against the Gnostics. The result of this anti-Gnostic polemic was that a statement was included in the early baptismal creeds of the local churches, which finally became part of the Creed we all use in the liturgy, declaring that it is God the Father who made the material world (“I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth”) and that consequently the material world (namely, “all things visible and invisible”) is good, since it was made by God the Father. Evil of course remains a problem. But this should not lead us to the conclusion that the world is bad by nature or that it is not God’s creation. The Church had to find other ways of explaining the presence of evil without attributing it either to God or to the material world. So much for Gnosticism, which introduced a gap between God and creation. Platonism and mainstream classical Greek thought took the opposite position. For them not only was the gap between God and the world narrowed to the point of often disappearing altogether, but in fact the world was penetrated by divine presence in all its

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parts. “Everything is filled with gods,” as the famous saying put it. Some identified the world with God to the extent of not needing a doctrine of creation at all. Others, like Plato, believed that the world was created by someone, whom Plato called Father, or Mind (nous) or Creator (demiourgos), and who made the best possible world—though not absolutely perfect, to be sure—given that the world is made from matter and enclosed in space, which inevitably acted as limitations on its creator. Thus the material world, in the Platonist view of things, is good and beautiful, yet only insofar as it partakes of the absolute goodness and beauty which is to be found outside this material world—namely, in the world of ideas to which we can ascend through contemplation and intellectual purification (catharsis), moving from the sensible to the spiritual, and ultimately to the ideal world. Pure Platonism took a positive view of the material universe as a means of providing us with a ladder to ascend higher; it was Neoplatonism a little later that showed a distrust for the material world and regarded it negatively. Now the Church did not react to Platonism in the same polemical way as it did to Gnosticism. In fact, it seemed to like the idea that the world was attributed to a “creator” (called even the Father-God by Plato) and some of her greatest theologians, such as St. Justin Martyr and Philosopher in the second century, came out strongly in favor of Plato on almost also counts, including creation. Yet it would be a mistake to regard the Church of the first centuries as having accepted the Platonist or ancient Greek view of the world, for the differences were very deep and relate directly to the subject of this chapter. Let us consider them briefly.

Creation as “Beginning” If we look carefully into the issues that divided the Church from ancient Greek philosophy as a whole on the subject of creation, we can perhaps locate the heart of the problem and the crucial difference in the question of whether the world has had a beginning or not. This question, as we shall try to show, has such far-reaching implications, that it can be said to constitute one of the most important aspects of the relation between Christian theology and the ecological problem. That the world had a beginning seemed to be utter nonsense and an absurdity to all ancient Greek thinkers.

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As Professor Richard Sorabji states, in his well-known study Time, Creation and Continuum,1 the view that the universe had had a beginning “was denied by everybody in European antiquity outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.” For all ancient Greeks the world was eternal. One may argue that Plato in his Timaeus—the famous work that deals with creation— accepts the idea of a beginning in creation. But this beginning, as indeed all notions of beginning in ancient Greek thought, was not absolute, since it always presupposed something from which the world (or anything for that matter) was created. In the case of Plato’s Timaeus this presupposed “something” which the creator used to in order to create the world, such as matter, ideas and even space (chora), all of which acted as conditions limiting the creator’s freedom. Creation was therefore “without beginning,” and although particular beings in it could be said to have beginnings, the world taken as a whole had no beginning. The Church and the Fathers reacted negatively to this view. They felt that it limited God’s freedom in creating, since He had to work with preexisting matter and other conditions. It also made God and the world somehow eternally coexistent. They had therefore to modify Platonism in this respect if they were in some sense to be “Christian Platonists.” Such a modification had already been made through what we call “Middle Platonism” (the Platonist Schools of the first two centuries AD before Neoplatonism appeared in the third century) and with Philo (the famous Jewish philosopher of Alexandria in the first century AD). The modification involved the idea that matter was not created by God, and the suggestion that Plato’s ideas, on the basis of which God formed creation, were thoughts in the mind of God. This modification removed to a large extent the crudest aspects of Plato’s doctrine of creation, and those most provocative to the Christian mind, but still left enough to make Platonism unacceptable to the Church on this subject. Where did the problem lie? The real problem became evident when Christian Platonists, such as Origen of Alexandria in the third century, put forward the view of an eternal creation on the basis of the belief mentioned earlier that the ideas or logoi, with which the world was created, were thoughts

1

Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008.

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in the mind of God as well as in order to answer the question of “how God could be almighty eternally, if He had no world on which to exercise His power?” This not only led Origen to the view, officially condemned by the Church a few centuries later, that souls were eternally preexisting, but it also showed clearly the dangers involved in any doctrine of creation which does not presuppose a radical and absolute beginning. As the late Fr. Florovsky put it,2 Origen’s doctrine of creation implied that, beside God, there was always a non-ego, a nonGod, which meant that God was Creator by necessity and not freely. Unless he created the world, he would remain unfulfilled and therefore would not be God. In this case, the notion of God and the notion of creation overlap, and paganism would make its reappearance disguised under the form of Christian doctrine. Thus the idea that the world has had a beginning ought to be taken in an absolute sense. But how could this absolute sense be described? And how could it make sense without leading to absurdity as the ancient Greeks thought? Above all, how does such an idea of absolute beginning affect our existence in this world and eventually the world’s fate? These are questions to which we shall now turn.

Creation “Out of Nothing” The idea that the world had an absolute beginning could only be expressed through the formula that the world was created “out of nothing” (ex nihilo). But what does “nothing” mean in this case? Can there ever be something “out of nothing”? The ancient Greeks replied categorically in the negative. Christians had to find a way of making sense of this statement. Some of these ways did not always maintain the absolute character of nothingness, but succumbed indirectly to the logic of Greek thought which could not accept this idea and found it absurd. Such an understanding of “out of nothing” is to be found already in the Neoplatonists, who understood it in the sense that a creation without beginning could be produced by God without its See “Creation and Createdness,” in The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky: Essential Theological Writings, eds. Brandon Gallaher and Paul Ladouceur (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2019), 41–2. 2

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coming out of anything. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages gave a meaning to “nothing” that could not possibly amounted to more or less a source out of which creation came, while Karl Barth in our own time seems to understand “nothing” as a sort of void which God rejected in opting for Christ pre-eternally as the one in whom and through whom He created the world. All these interpretations of “out of nothing” should not be confused with what St. Irenaeus and other Church Fathers understood by it. The purpose of this expression for them was to indicate that nothing at all existed previously to creation; no factor whatsoever apart from God’s free will was at work or contributed in any way toward the creation of the world. In order to make sense of this understanding of “out of nothing,” the ancient Christian theologians had to make one thing clear: time and space are categories which come into being together with creation. It is meaningless to ask “what did God do before creating” because there is no such thing as “before” and “after” until creation. Time and space are notions that have to do with beginning, and whatever had no beginning could not be measured with such categories. Thus, it seems that by accepting the view that the world had a beginning, the Christians opted for a view of time, which (a) is tied up with space organically—something that Platonism, for example, could not consider; and (b) characterizes exclusively the created world—just as space also does—and together with space affects the existence of the universe throughout and decisively. There is no way, then, for the world to escape from space and time or from the precondition of beginning which lay behind its being. Created being is by definition subject to these conditions, which not only mark the difference between God and the world, created and uncreated, but also determine the world existentially. It is to the existential conditions of being created “out of nothing” that we shall now turn our attention, for they have to do directly with the subject of the ecological crisis. What does being created “out of nothing” imply existentially? How does the world “experience,” as it were, the fact that it had a beginning? We can reply briefly to this question by making the following points: (a) If we take the world as “whole,” as an entity in itself, which we can do if we regard it, as we actually do, as finite and as other than God. In other words, the fact that the world had

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a beginning forces us to put a line of demarcation, a point of departure, at least at its beginning. A classical logical axiom would oblige us to put a line of demarcation, a stopping point also at the end, for according to this axiom whatever has a beginning will also have an end. But even leaving aside this axiom, the idea of finitude, attached to that of creaturehood, by definition implies that in the very concept of creaturehood there lies together with the idea of the beginning, also that of the end. All this means that creation taken in itself—and this condition is of decisive importance for, as we shall see, things are different if creation is not taken “in itself”—constitutes an entity surrounded and conditioned by nothing. It came from nothing and therefore it will return to nothing. I have called this implication of creaturehood “existential,” not because I have in mind certain modern philosophical schools that bear this name, but because there is in fact no other way for us to speak of the universe except by somehow personifying it and attributing to it categories that stem from our own experience. We cannot for instance avoid associating the disappearance of a certain thing with the experience of death and vice versa, the experience of death with the disappearance or extinction of something. If the universe is conceivable as a finite particular entity, the very possibility of conceiving it in our minds implies putting lines of demarcation around it. But lines of demarcation, allowing for the conception mentally, imply existentially the experience of a “before” and an “after,” the experience of the “beginning” and the “end” of the thing conceived, therefore something analogous to the experience of the birth as well as the death of something. In this way of speaking, therefore, emphasizing that the world had an absolute beginning implies that, taken in itself, it hangs in a void, and cannot avoid the threat of death. The universe is not eternal either in terms of its beginning or in terms of its end. It is mortal, and mortality in this case is as absolute as the use of the term “nothing”—that is to say, it signifies total extinction. (b) If we do not take the world as a whole, as an entity in itself, but look instead at its interior—at what happens, so to say, inside it—then we observe the same consequences of the

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fact that it has come into being out of nothing. Just as the world in its totality has had a beginning, so each particular being that makes it up is conditioned by a beginning which threatens it with extinction. The space-time structure of the universe is “experienced” by everything and everyone in the world as the means by which entities acquire their being and are at the same time their nonbeing. My father was united with me through time, and through the same time he is divided from me by his death. The same speech that unites me with you at this moment also separates me from you. Things are brought together and are separated by the same means. Space and time are the exclusive characteristics of creation, and this is expressed in every simple being that can be said to have an identity of its own. No individual thing can exist without space and time,3 and this—unless space a time were always there, that is, unless they were without beginning—proves them in the end to be nonentities. One could therefore say that the nothingness out of which the world came into being permeates it and affects every single being within the universe. Death is experienced as return to nothingness, in spite of the fact that new entities may emerge out of the old ones that died. For neither can the fact that species procreate change the fact that a concrete progenitor “A” no longer exists after his death as a particular identity, nor, still worse, can the return of a corpse to the earth in order to become the basic natural elements for other forms of life be a consolation for the loss of a particular being. Death amounts to the extinction of particular beings precisely because the world, having come out of nothing and being penetrated by nothing, does not possess any means in its nature whereby to overcome nothingness. Plato had to make use of the idea of immortality as a natural characteristic of the soul in order to secure the overcoming of death in the universe. And Aristotle, having at some point denied this belief of his master, had to rely on the immortality of the species through procreation. In these ways the world as a whole would achieve immortality, yet at expense of particular beings.

See P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990). 3

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But a Christian? What could a Christian do to secure the overcoming of death as extinction of particular beings, given the fact that there was no eternal and immortal element in the nature of creation, all of them—including souls, species, and matter—having had a beginning? It is tragic, but once we accept the doctrine of creation “out of nothing,” we are unable to find anything in this world that is not subject to death. Indeed, what is even more significant, we cannot understand death as anything less than total extinction. Here I find the words of Miguel de Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life to be quite revealing: “For myself I can say that as a youth and even as a child I remained quite unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared quite so horrible to me as nothingness itself.”4 These words may easily be taken as sheer psychologizing and therefore dismissed by means of hard logical thinking. But the psychological aspects of death—which may or may not play an important role depending on the particular individual and his mood at the time—is not all that is contained in this quotation. In fact, this quotation conveys faithfully the message of Christian theology that the world as a whole, like every part of it, exists under the threat of nothingness, because it was created “out of nothing” in the absolute sense of the word. The world possesses no natural power in itself which would enable it to overcome this situation; for if it did it would have been immortal and eternal by nature. It would have had no absolute beginning in the absolute sense as the ancient Greeks rightly observed. A Christian who wishes to balance both the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and a faith that the world possesses in its nature some kind of means for eternal survival is bound to be logically inconsistent. For what such a view implies is that the eternal God created an eternal world—that is, another God by nature, which amounts to a total denial of the doctrine of creation “out of nothing” and at the same time the abolition of the distinction between created and uncreated being, a distinction on which the entire patristic tradition insisted so much.

Del sentimiento tragica de la vita, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover; reissued by Fontana Library Edition, 1962), 28. 4

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Conclusion Now, I am aware that this has raised a question in the minds of readers. If things are the way we have described them, does this mean that the world was created by God in order to disappear one day? Was God so cruel as to bring about beings other than Himself without taking any measures to secure their survival? Do we truly believe in a God who is “the God not of the dead but of the living?” And who else could love the world to the point of wanting it to share his own life and bliss? Of course all this is true. But the question is how did God want the world to survive and share his own life? And theologically speaking, the question is how to state all this in a way which does not involve logical contradictions or come up against fundamental scientific facts, which would exclude theology from normal scientific or philosophical discourse. After all, it is easy for theology to speak its own language to its own people and thus to form an esoteric ghetto of its own. But we have started here with the assumption that theology can offer something to man in his attempt to face a crisis created by culture, including science and philosophy. We intend to adhere to this assumption in spite of the challenges of dealing adequately with such a vast and difficult problem. We therefore wish to articulate Christian theology in a way that would remain faithful to the logical consequences of its own assumptions, and not contradict them. Thus it is an assumption, a doctrine of the Church, that the world was created “out of nothing” in the absolute sense of the term, a doctrine that clearly distinguished Christianity from ancient pagan religions and philosophies. The fact that in our time natural science does not find it inconceivable that the world was created out of absolutely nothing can enable theology to enter into constructive discourse with the scientist. But even if the scientist were to disagree about this doctrine, the Christian theologian having accepted it in the first instance, would have to be logically consistent with it. This consistency will have to be observed also in trying to answer the question: How did God envisage the survival of the world given the fact that He created it “out of nothing”? We have already noted that it would be inconsistent to assume that God endowed the world with a natural capacity for survival. For such an assumption would imply that between God and the

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world there is a natural affinity—a syggenia as the ancient Greek would say. Anything naturally common between God and creation would make the two realities one in a substantial way. This is why the Fathers had to reject the Neoplatonist idea of emanations, the Platonist and Origenist idea of the eternity of souls, as well as the Aristotelian view of the eternity of matter. It is a matter of logical inconsistency to seek the survival of creation in ways other than these. But if we exclude the assumption that the world possesses in its nature some factor securing its survival, and still want to secure this survival, we are left only with one solution: we must find a way of uniting the world with God, the only eternal and immortal being, other than a natural affinity. We must find a link between the two that would secure the communication of life between them without abolishing the natural otherness between God and creation. Can such a link be found? And can such a linkage make any sense? As a solution to this problem Christian doctrine offers the place of man in creation. It is in the human being that we must seek the link between God and the world, and it is precisely this that makes man responsible, in a sense the only being responsible for the fate of creation. What an awful responsibility and at the same time what a glorious mission! “Man is the glory of God,” declares St. Irenaeus, and with good reason. But why and how can man be the solution to the problem of the survival of creation? What qualities does he possess that enable him to achieve this? And why has he failed in this mission? These are questions which we shall attempt to discuss in our final section of this chapter.

Lecture III: Anthropological Overture In the previous section, we saw how the Christian Church through its main theological representatives in the early centuries viewed the world as God’s creation. Against Gnosticism it stressed the view that God the Father Himself, through His own “two hands,” the Son and the spirit, as St. Irenaeus put it, created the material universe freely and out of love. Against the Platonists and pagan Greek thinkers in general the Church emphasizes that the world was created “out of nothing,” in the absolute sense of the term “nihil,” thereby ruling out the possibility of any natural affinity between God and creation as

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well as at the same time any view of the world as eternal, coexisting with the only eternal and immortal being which is God. This is another way of saying that the world is contingent, that it might not have existed at all, and that its existence is a free gift, not a necessity. Nonetheless, the view that the world came out of nothing in this absolute sense and that it has no natural affinity with the eternal and everlasting God has its logical consequence. It means that creation is under the constant threat of a return to nothingness, a threat which all particular beings that make it up experience as a decay and death. The fear of death, so widespread in creation and implicit in every creature’s attempt to survive at all costs, is not a fear of the suffering that death can cause, but of the return to nothingness that it involves. Creation as a whole, too, taken in itself, is subject to extinction. Natural scientists today seem to say this, as they also seem to be endorsing—or at least not excluding—the view that the universe came out of nothing. Both logically and existentially the doctrine of the creation of the world “out of nothing” implies that the world can be extinguished, for it has no natural capacity for survival. However, Christian faith goes hand in hand with hope and love. If God created the world out of love—for what other motive can we attribute to Him, knowing what He has done for the world?—there must be hope for the world’s survival. But how is this possible? A simple, perhaps simplistic, answer to this question might be that since God is almighty He can simply order things to happen so that the world may survive in spite of its contingency. In order words, miracle working might save the world. Perhaps this is the answer given by most people in the face of the Apocalypse. But Christian faith does not believe in solutions provided by a Deus ex machina. We cannot, like the ancient Greeks, introduce divine intervention at the end of a tragedy, in which everything moves with mathematical accuracy to destruction. God did not, in creating the world, leave it without the means for its survival. In creating the world, God also provided for its survival. What does all this mean? Toward the end of the previous section, we insisted that we cannot introduce solutions to the problem of the survival of creation which are logically inconsistent with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and all this involves. Above all we cannot introduce into the world any natural capacities for survival. We have previously stated by way of conclusion that the solution

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to the problem lies in the creation of man. In the following section, we shall try to see how and why the human being is understood by the Christian faith to be capable of performing such a role. We shall thus arrive at some idea of what we intended when in our first section we referred to “Man as the Priest of Creation.” On this basis, we shall then try to draw some final conclusions about the relation between theology and the ecological problem.

What Is Man? In the first section of this chapter, we referred to Darwinism as a helpful reaction to the view, widespread since the Middle Ages but also long before that, that the human being is superior to the rest of creation because of the intellect it possesses. This had several consequences, including the following: On the one hand it is implied that, in the scale of beings, the highest ones after God—in a sense the link between God and creation—are the angels, owing to their spiritual and noncorporeal nature. On the other hand, this view implies that it is in and through man’s reason that the world can be joined to God and thus survive. Even today the idea of man as the “priest of creation” is understood by some in terms of rationality. Man’s task is understood to be to “interpret the books of nature, to understand the universe in its wonderful structure and harmonies and to bring it all into orderly articulation . . . . Theological and natural science each has its proper objective to pursue but their work inevitably overlaps, for both operate through the rational structures of space and time.”5 Such a view of man’s distinctive identity and role in creation in terms of rationality has contributed a great deal to the creation of the ecological problem, as we noted earlier. For rationality can be used in both directions: it can either be used as a means of referring the creation to the Creator in a doxological attitude— and it is apparently this that the aforementioned view of “priest of creation” intends, but it can also be used as a means of turning creation toward man, which is the source of our ecological

T. F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology: Consonance between Theology and Science (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 1–14. 5

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problem. In fact, in this culture of ours where the rules of the game are set by the Enlightenment, the discussion of whether it is more “rational” to refer creation to God or else to man can lead nowhere except to a reinforcement of the presupposition laid down by the Enlightenment that reason is all that matters. In any case, Darwinism dealt a blow to this presupposition with regard to the distinctive characteristics of the human being. Man’s particular identity in relation to the rest of the animals does not lie in reason, since lower animals also possess reason and consciousness, albeit to a lower degree. If we wish to state the specific characteristic of the human being which no animal possesses, then we should look for it elsewhere, not in rationality. Before we discuss what the Christian tradition has to say on this matter, let us explore succinctly what the nontheological world seems to be saying on the question of man’s particular identity. Very briefly, a consensus seems to be emerging among philosophers that the human being differs fundamentally from the animals in this particular respect: Whereas the animal in facing the world where it finds itself develops all its—why not label them so?—rational capacities in order to adjust to it, the human being seeks to create its own world. Of course the animal, too, discovers the laws of nature— sometimes even more successfully than the human being. Indeed, it can also invent ways of tackling the problems raised for it by the environment. All this man can do as well, as modern technology shows. But the human being alone can create a world of its own with culture and history. Man for example can reproduce a tree as another—his or her own personal—creation through the art of painting. Man can create events and institutions, not merely as a means for survival or welfare in the way that birds build their nests or bees construct their hives, but as landmarks and points of reference for his own identity. When one says, for example, I am English, one does not simply imply that he or she lives in a certain geographical area, but a great deal more than that, which has to do with one’s identity and creativity, with the emergence of identities other than what is given by the natural environment. Now all this can arguably be explained by rationality. In his higher degree of rationality than the animals, man can create culture, history, and civilization. However, much can also be said against this assumption; for the creation of culture involves a far

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more radical kind of difference between man and animal than what rationality would imply. There is something in man’s creativity that we could hardly attribute to rationality, since in fact it is its very opposite. Man, and only man, in creating his world, can go against the inherent rationality of nature, of the world given to him: in fact, he can even destroy the given world. This is precisely because man seems to be challenged and provoked by the given. In wishing to create his own world, or simply to assert his own will, man is disturbed by the already existing world. All great artists have experienced this. Michelangelo used to exclaim: When shall I finish with this marble so I can start doing my own work? And Picasso is reported to have pondered similar things about forms, shapes and colors. Plato’s creator too, conceived in the Timaeus, as an artist, suffers because he has to create out of preexisting matter and space, which impose their conditions on him. No creator can be content with the given. If he succumbs to it, he is frustrated and uneasy as all creative artists in all ages seem to have been. If she does not succumb to it, then she has to destroy it and create out of nothing. But inasmuch as creating ex nihilo can only be the privilege of the uncreated creator, all attempts by man to create his own world— whether in art, history or other areas of civilization—are bound to lead to frustration. There have, of course, been forms of human “creativity” in history that involved a copying of the world as it is. However, hardly anyone would call such things true art. Whatever involves succumbing to the given, this man has in common with the animals. Whatever is free from such, this constitutes a sign of the presence of the human. This can even lead so far as the destruction of the given by man. At this point the human phenomenon emerges even more clearly. For no animal would go against the inherent rationality of nature. Man alone can do that, and in so doing, man shows that his specific characteristic is not rationality but something else: it is freedom. What is freedom? We normally use this word in order to indicate the capacity to choose between two or more possibilities. We are free to attend or not a particular lecture; we are free to vote for this or that party. But this is merely a relative, not an absolute, freedom. It is limited by the possibilities given to us. And it is this very givenness that constitutes the greatest provocation to freedom. Why choose between what is given to me and not be free to create my own

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possibilities? You can see then how the question of freedom and that of creation out of nothing are interdependent: if one creates out of nothing, one is free in the absolute sense of the term. Now, we observed in the preceding section that the Church insisted on the idea that God created “out of nothing.” We can appreciate this fully only if we wish to attach to our notion of God the absolute sense of freedom: to be God means to be absolutely free in the sense of not being bound or confronted by any situation or reality that is given. For if something, even in the form of a possibility, is given to you, this implies that someone or something else exists besides you, which would rule out any absolutely monotheistic view of God such as the one proclaimed by the Bible. But what about the human being? Man is by definition a creature. This means that he is inevitably presented with a given. The fact that in the biblical account of creation, man emerges at the end of a creative process renders the human being doubly restricted: the world is given to him, but God the Creator is given to him too. Man can choose what he likes, but he cannot avoid the fact of givenness. Is he, therefore, free in an absolute sense? It is at this point that the idea of the imago Dei emerges. Christian anthropology since its earliest days insisted that man was created “in the image and likeness of God.” The idea, or rather the expression, appears from first time in the Old Testament, in the Genesis account of creation (Gen. 1:26). It is taken up by the Church Fathers and Christian theology throughout history. Various meanings have been given to this experience, including the one we mentioned earlier which identifies the image of God in man with his reason. Whatever the case may be, if we speak of an “image and likeness of God,” then we must refer inevitably to something which characterizes God in an exclusive way. If the imago Dei consists in something to be found outside God, it is not an image of God. We are talking, therefore, about a quality pertaining to God and not to creation. This forces us to seek the imago Dei in freedom. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century already defined this idea as man’s freedom (autexousion) to be master of himself. If this freedom is conceived in the way in which it is applied to God—which is what it ought to be if we are talking about an image of God—then we are talking about absolute freedom in the sense of not being confronted with anything given. Yet this would be absurd; for man is a creature and cannot but be confronted with a given.

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It is at this point that another category, pertaining exclusively to the definition of the human emerges—namely, tragedy, or the tragic. Tragedy is the impasse created by a freedom driving toward its fulfillment and being unable to reach it. The tragic applies only to the human condition. It is not applicable either to God or to the rest of creation. It is impossible to have a complete definition of man without reference to the tragic element, and this is related directly to the subject of freedom. Dostoyevsky, the great Christian prophet of modern times, put his finger on this critical issue when he placed the following words in the mouth of Kirilov, one of his heroes in The Possessed: Everyone who wants to attain complete freedom must be daring enough to kill himself . . . This is the final limit of freedom, that is all, there is nothing but it . . . Who dares to kill himself becomes God. Everyone can do this and thus cause God to cease to exist, and then nothing will exist at all.6 If man wishes to be God, he has to cope with the givenness of his own being. As long as he is faced with the fact that he is “created,” which means that his being is given to him, he cannot be said to be free in the absolute sense. Yet man in so many ways manifests his desire to attain to such an absolute freedom: in fact, it is precisely this that distinguishes him from the animals. So why did God give him such an unfulfillable drive? Indeed, many people would wish for themselves as well as for others that they were not free in this absolute sense. The Christian Church has produced throughout the centuries devices by which man, particularly the Christian believer, would be so tamed and domesticated that he would give up all claims to absolute freedom, leaving such claims only to God. But certainly, if God gave such a drive to man, if God made man in His own image and likeness, He must have had a purpose. We suggest that this purpose has to do precisely with the survival of creation, with man’s call to be “the priest of creation.” But before we come to see

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons: A Novel in Three Parts, trans. Robert A. Maguire (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), 685. [Translation here from the Greek.] 6

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how this can be envisaged, let us see how man applied this drive and how creation has been affected by it.

Man’s Failure Christian anthropology speaks of the first man, Adam, as having been placed in paradise with the order to exercise dominion over creation. That he was supposed to do this in and through his freedom is implied by the fact that he was presented with a decision to obey or disobey a certain commandment by God: not to eat from a certain tree. This commandment involved the invitation to exercise the freedom implied in the imago Dei, to act as if man were God. This Adam did, and the result is well known. In theological language we refer to this as “the Fall” of man. At this point, however, the question arises: Why did man fall by exercising what God Himself had given him, namely freedom? Would it not perhaps have been better for all of us if Adam had been content with a relative freedom as befits a creature? Did the tragedy of the Fall consist in the excess of the limits of human freedom? The answer commonly given to these questions is a positive one: yes, Adam exceeded the limits of his freedom, and this is why he fell. It is for this reason that Adam’s Fall is commonly associated with Adam’s fault—a fault understood therefore forensically: man should not exceed his limits, if he wishes to avoid punishment. Now, this sort of attitude to the Fall of man provokes two reactions immediately: (a) The first is that it reminds one immediately of classical Greek thought. We all know the Greek word hubris, by which the ancient Greeks indicated that the human being “falls”—that is, sins—and is punished every time he exceeds his limits and tries to be God. This of course does not prove in itself that the Christian view of things ought to be different from that of the Greeks. It simply warns us that something may be wrong with the preceding interpretation of the Fall. (b) The real difficulty arises from the following question: If Adam ought not to exercise any absolute freedom, then why did God give him the drive toward this? We have to seek

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ways of interpreting the Fall other than the one that blames Adam for having exceeded the limits of his freedom. We shall have perhaps to abandon forensic categories of guilt. It is more logical, more consistent with our view of the imago Dei, if we follow, not St. Augustine, but instead St. Irenaeus in this respect. St. Irenaeus took a very “philanthropic” and very compassionate view of Adam’s Fall. He thought of Adam as a child placed in paradise in order to mature to adulthood by exercising his freedom. But he was deceived and did the wrong thing. What does this mean? It means that it was not a question of exceeding the limits of freedom. It was rather a question of applying absolute freedom in the wrong way. This is very different from saying that Adam ought to adjust the drive of his freedom to his creaturely limitations. For had he adjusted his freedom this way, he would have lost the drive to absolute freedom, whereas now he can still have it—readjusted and redirected. The implications of what we are saying here are far-reaching. They include all sorts of consequences for the legalistic views of sin, which not by accident go hand in hand with cries for relativized freedom. But we shall limit ourselves to the implications that relate directly to our subject, which is the survival of creation through man. Man was given the drive to absolute freedom, the imago Dei, not for himself, but for creation. How are we to understand this?

Man, the Hope of All Creation We have already noted that creation does not possess any natural means of survival. This implies that, if left to itself, it would die. The only way to avoid this would be communion with the eternal God. This, however, would involve a movement of transcendence beyond the boundaries of creation. It would require in other words, freedom in the absolute sense. If creation were to attempt its survival only by obedience to God—in the sense of its realizing, as it were, its own limitations and not attempting to transcend them—its survival would require the miracle of an intervention by the Deus ex machina, which we described earlier. This would have to result in a claim which would bear no logical relation to the rest of creation, as is precisely the situation with all Deus ex machina solutions.

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If we accept the view that the world needs to transcend itself in order to survive, which is the logical consequence of having accepted that the world had a beginning, we need to find a way of achieving this transcendence. This is what the imago Dei was given for. The transcendence of the limits of creation, which is, I repeat, the condition of its survival, requires on the part of creation a drive to absolute freedom. The fact that this drive was given to man made the whole creation rejoice, in accordance with the words of St Paul, that creation “awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the glory of the children of God,” namely, of man. Because man, unlike the angels—who are also regarded as being endowed with freedom—comprises an organic part of the material world. Being the highest point in its evolution, man is able to carry with him the whole creation to its transcendence. The fact that the human animal is also an animal, as Darwin has reminded us, far from being an insult to the human race, constitutes—despite Darwin’s intentions perhaps—the sine qua non condition for his glorious mission in creation. If man gave up his claim to absolute freedom, then the whole creation would automatically lose its hope for survival. This allows us to say that it is better that Adam fell by retaining his claim to absolute freedom, than had he remained unfallen by renouncing this claim, thereby reducing himself to an animal. In this way of understanding the Fall, it is not right to speak of “total depravity” of the image of God. Man in his negative attitude to God still exercises the claim to absolute freedom, albeit against his own good and that of creation. For in fact only such a claim can cause a revolt against God. But how can man liberate creation from its boundaries and lead it to survival through his freedom? At this point, Christian theology has to rely on its doctrinal resources rather heavily. Nevertheless, we will try to do so in such a way as to avoid as far as is possible making it a matter of an esoteric language understood only by those who have access to it by their doctrinal commitment or intellectual engagement.

Man’s Priesthood We have already referred to man’s tendency to create a new world. This tendency constitutes the specific characteristic that renders man distinct from the animals, and it is in this sense an essential

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expression of the image of God in him. This means that man wishes to pass through his own hands everything that exists and make it his own. This can result in one of the following possibilities: (a) Making it “his own” may mean that man can use creation for his own benefit, in which case, by being placed in man’s hands, creation is not truly lifted to the level of the human, but subjected to it. This is one of the ways in which man can understand God’s commandment to have dominion over the earth. This could be labelled the utilitarian way. Now further analysis of this situation yields the following implications: (i) Theologically speaking, man would become the ultimate point of reference in existence—that is, become God. (ii) Anthropologically speaking, man would cut himself off from nature, as if he did not belong to it himself. The utilitarian attitude to creation would then go hand in hand with the view that man differs from the rest of creation by way of his capacity to disassociate himself from it rather than to associate himself with it. It would also go together with the possibility of denying God and divinizing man. Atheism and man’s disassociation from nature would thus be shown to be interconnected. They both spring from the imago Dei and confirm the view that the difference between man and creation relates to the question of freedom. Needless to say, the ecological problem has its philosophy deeply rooted in this kind of anthropology. An understanding of the world as man’s possession—as a means of drawing from it self-satisfaction and pleasure—is what taking the world in man’s hands means in this case. Science and technology then signify the employment of man’s intellectual superiority for the purpose of discovering ways and means by which man may draw the biggest possible profit from creation for his own purposes. In this case, a theology based on the assumption that the essence of man lies in his intellect would be co-responsible with science and technology for the ecological problem. (b) At the same time, however, making the world pass through the hands of man may mean something entirely different

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from what we have just described. In this second case the utilitarian element would not arise. Of course man would still use creation as a source from which he would draw the basic elements necessary for his life. But to all this he would add a dimension which we could call personal. What does this personal dimension involve? The person as distinct from the individual is marked by the following characteristics:

(i) He cannot be understood in isolation but only in relation to something or someone else.

In a personal approach to creation as distinct from an individualistic approach, one would regard the human being as someone whose particular identity arises from his relation with what is not human. This could be both or either God and/or creation. We shall see in a moment what is involved in each of these possibilities. It is not therefore in juxtaposition to nature, but in association with it, that man would find his specific identity. Man would be other than nature not by separating himself from it but by relating himself to it. This will become immediately evident in culture: the way that man eats or dresses or builds houses would involve a close relationship with what is not human, with what is significantly called “the environment.”

(ii) A personal approach to creation would elevate the material world to the level of man’s existence.

The material creation would in this way be liberated from its limitations and, by being placed in the hands of man, it would acquire a personal dimension. It would, in fact, be humanized. The personal dimension, as distinct from the individual one, involves what we may call a hypostatization and catholicity. These terms are technical in theology but they can easily be translated into nontheological language. A hypostasis is an identity which embodies and expresses in itself the totality of nature. To take an example: if we regarded persons as hypostases of human being, we could regard killing someone as a crime against the totality of human nature, rather than as only a crime against a particular individual. In this case, it could be argued that murder would be “rationally” and perhaps more efficiently prevented in a society which does not appeal to the rationality of the “rights of

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the individual” but which has a view of each human being as the hypostasis of the totality of human nature. The doctrine of God as Trinity can be particularly meaningful and relevant in this regard. The personal approach renders every being unique and irreplaceable, whereas the individual approach makes it simply a statistic. If man acts as a person rather than an individual toward creation, he not only lifts it up to the level of the human, but he sees it as a totality, as a catholicity of interrelated entities. Creation is thus able to fulfill the unity which, as natural science observes today, is inherent in its very structure. Now, all this a human being can do without needing God or without any reference to God. Certainly, in the utilitarian approach, God is not needed except in the best of cases, and then only to be thanked for what God has given us to have dominion over and enjoy—a verbal, rationalistic, and sentimental thanksgiving, like the one we find in so much of the Christian tradition. However, in the personal approach, things cannot stop with man. They cry aloud for a reference to God. Why is this? If we look at what the story of Adam’s Fall implies for creation, we notice that the most serious consequence of the Fall was death. It is normally understood—at least ever since St. Augustine influenced our thinking—that death came to creation as a punishment for Adam’s disobedience. This, nonetheless, implies a great many unacceptable things. It would mean that God Himself introduced this horrible evil, which He then tried to remove through the Incarnation of His Son. Moreover, it would seem to imply that, before the arrival of man in creation, there was no death at all. This assumption contradicts the entire theory of evolution in creation, and would also make it cruel and absurd of the Creator to punish all creatures for what only one of them did. These difficulties lead us to the conclusion that the view of Irenaeus of Lyons and Maximus the Confessor is more reasonable on all counts, including with regard to the theory of evolution. This view sees creation as being from the beginning in a state of mortality—owing as we argued in the previous section, to its having had a beginning—and as awaiting the arrival of man in order to overcome this predicament. Adam’s Fall brought about death not as a new thing in creation but as the inability to overcome the mortality inherent in it. If Adam’s Fall consists in his making man the ultimate point of reference in creation, then we can easily see why death

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entered into the world through the Fall. It was because Adam himself was a creature, while creation, being subjected ultimately to man, could not overcome its limitations, including that of mortality. But this could have been avoided, had man acted as the priest of creation. The personhood in man demands constantly that creation be treated as something destined by God not only to survive but also to be “fulfilled” in and through man’s hands. There are two basic dimensions in personhood, both of which enable the human being to fulfill his role as the link between God and creation. One is what we may call its hypostatic aspect, through which the world is integrated and embodied into a unified reality. The other is what we can call its ecstatic aspect, through which the world by being referred to God and offered to him as “His own” reaches forward toward infinite possibilities. This constitutes the basis of what we can call man’s priesthood. By taking the world into his hands and creatively integrating it and referring it to God, man liberates creation from its limitations and lets it truly be. Thus, in being the priest of creation, man is also a creator. We could even say that, in all of man’s truly creative activities, there is hidden a parapriestly character. In speaking of “priesthood,” therefore, we speak of a broader existential attitude encompassing all human activities that include a conscious or even unconscious manifestation of these two aspects of personhood, as described earlier—namely, the hypostatic and the ec-static dimensions. To put all this in terms of Christian doctrine, we Christians believe that what Adam failed to do, Christ was able to achieve. We regard Christ as the embodiment or anakephalaiosis of all creation, and therefore as the man par excellence and savior of the world. We regard Christ, because of this, as the true image of God and we associate Him with the final fate of the world. This is why we believe that, in the person of Christ, the world possesses its priest of creation, the very model of man’s proper relation to the natural world. On the basis of this belief, we form a community which takes from this creation certain elements—the bread and the wine—which we offer to God with the solemn declaration: “Your own of Your own we offer unto You.” In this way, we recognize that creation does not belong to us but to God, who is its only “owner.” By doing so we believe that creation is brought into relation with God. Indeed, not only is it treated with the reverence that befits what belongs to God,

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but it is also liberated from its natural limitation and transformed into a bearer of life. We believe that by doing this “in Christ,” we too, like Christ, act as priests of creation. When we receive these elements back, after having referred them to God, we believe that because of this reference to God we can take them back and consume them no longer as death but as life. Creation acquires for us in this way a sacredness which is not inherent in its nature but “acquired” in and through man’s free exercise of his imago Dei—that is to say, the revelation of his personhood. This distinguishes our attitude from all forms of paganism, while attaching to the human being an awesome responsibility for the survival of God’s creation. All of this is a belief and practice that cannot be imposed on anyone else. In fact, it may easily be mistaken for sheer ritualism by others. Nevertheless, we believe that it involves an ethos that the world needs badly in our time. It is not mere ethics, but an ethos. It is not a program, but an attitude and a mentality, not a legislation but a culture. It seems, then, that the ecological crisis is a crisis of culture. It is a crisis that has to do with the loss of the sacrality of nature in our culture. I can see only two ways of overcoming this: One would be the way of paganism. The pagan regards the world as sacred because it is permeated by the divine presence; he therefore respects it, to the point of worshiping it explicitly or implicitly, and does not do damage to it. But equally he never worries about its fate: he believes in its eternity. He is unaware of any need for the transformation of nature or transcendence of it limitations. The world is good as it stands and possesses in its nature all that is necessary for its survival. The other way is what we have tried to describe here as the Christian way. The Christian regards the world as sacred because it stands in dialectical relationship with God; thus he respects it, albeit without worshiping it, since it has no divine presence in its nature. Instead, he regards the human being as the only possible link between God and creation, a link that can either bring nature to communion with God and thus sanctify it, or else turn it ultimately toward man or nature itself, thereby condemning it to the state of a “thing,” the meaning and purpose of which are exhausted with the satisfaction of man. Of these two ways, it is the second one that attaches to man a heavy responsibility for the fate of creation. The first one sees

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man as part of the world; the second, which considers man as the crucial link between the world and God, sees him as the only person in creation—that is, as the only one who would be so deeply respectful of the impersonal world as not simply to “preserve” it, but to cultivate and embody it in forms of culture that will elevate it to eternal survival. Unless we decide to return to the pagan way, this latter option seems to be the only way of once again respecting the sacrality of nature and facing the ecological crisis. For it is now clear that the model of human domination over nature, such as we have it in our present-day technical ethos, will no longer do for the survival of God’s creation.

8 The Eucharistic Vision of the World

Introduction The Orthodox tradition is profoundly liturgical. For Orthodoxy, “the Church is in the Eucharist and by the Eucharist,” while its concrete form is the temple in which the Eucharist is celebrated and which is also called—not coincidentally, of course—the Church. The entire universe is a liturgy, a cosmic liturgy that offers the whole of creation before the throne of God. Orthodox theology, too, is basically a doxology, a liturgy: it is a Eucharistic theology. But what is the significance of this for us today? The view of the world and of life has changed so much compared to people’s experience in Byzantium—and it continues to change so rapidly under the influence of scientific, philosophical, and sociological transformations—that we must ask: What could the Orthodox liturgical life offer us today? In light of the radical break that the modern world has made with the Church in the modern era, this question is especially pressing. Western civilization, though it was nourished by Christianity, has rapidly become de-Christianized. The Church, which still speaks the language and addresses the issues of the past, seems less and less relevant. Especially in the West, Christians have encountered the full force of this secularization. Yet the Western tradition—a tradition that lives under the weight of the dissociation and separation of the world into sacred and profane—only tends to multiply the problems rather than resolve them.

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In this situation, the Orthodox liturgical life presents itself as a witness of hope. In fact, the Eucharistic vision of the world and of its history is not experiencing the same crisis concerning the relationship between theology and life caused by the shift in contemporary thinking that is the fate of the philosophical style of theology—though, due to a lack of liturgical education, this is not always understood by the Orthodox themselves. The Orthodox liturgical life has its own worldview that not only can, but must be implemented in the present life. The Orthodox conception of humanity is particularly relevant today, for it provides, in short, an interpretation both of history and its problems as well as of the moral life and its possibilities. But how do we understand the Eucharist when we speak of a “Eucharistic vision of the world”? Answering this question is fundamental because, since the Scholastic era, the Eucharist has been much misunderstood and its sense much distorted. Thus the use of its former patristic and Orthodox meaning requires some explanation.

The Eucharist as Event In our conscience, the Eucharist is connected to the expression of a pietism that views it as an object—as something, as a means of expressing our piety and facilitating our salvation. However, the older understanding of the Eucharist viewed it not only or primarily as a thing, but as an action (and especially as an act of assembly), as a liturgy (this Orthodox term is very characteristic) and as the common (or catholic) expression of the whole Church— not as a vertical relationship between each individual and God. It is characteristic that the East, which has preserved this older understanding (albeit rather unconsciously), never introduced either private Masses or the adoration of the Holy Gifts in a form that reduced them to the state of an object of piety and worship. The Eucharist is essentially an event—an act of the whole Church— and not an individual action. We often consider the Eucharist as one sacrament among others—for example, as one among the seven. However, the ancient Church had a conception of a single, unique sacrament— namely, the sacrament of Christ, as it is called in Holy Scripture (Rom. 16:25; Eph. 3:4; 5:32; Col. 1:27; 2:2; 4:3). The only possible

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understanding of the Eucharist is Christological: it is the body of Christ Himself, the totus Christus. So we should not view it as a means of grace—as an abstract grace independent of Christology, which is unfortunately how we still present it in dogmatic treatises. We need to view the Eucharist as Christ Himself, who saves humanity and the world and reconciles us with God. Therefore, all the problems regarding the elements of the Eucharist, the debates concerning the real presence (or transubstantiation), and so on, which so preoccupied the Middle Ages, are secondary and bring us back to viewing the Eucharist as a thing. By contrast, the fundamental character of the Eucharist consists in the fact that it is an assembly and an act, that the whole mystery of Christ (the totus Christus) and the salvation of the world is revealed in it, lives in it, and is concentrated in it. If, therefore, we regard the Eucharist from this point of view, we must approach it as it stands before us in the concrete liturgy of the Orthodox Church, and not in some autonomous or abstract doctrine of the sacraments. This celebration of the liturgy will reveal that the Eucharist contains a particular vision of history.

The Eucharist as Acceptance of Creation The liturgy is the most positive and active acceptance of the world and creation. If monasticism as an act—not as a theory or as a practice—is characterized by a movement away from the world (by a flight from the world), then the liturgy is characterized by the opposite movement. All the faithful who attend the liturgy bring the world with them (and we mean this in the most realistic way). They bring not merely human flesh—the concrete life of the human being with all its weaknesses and passions. They also bring their relations with the natural world, with all of creation. In the ancient Church—but also today in the places where simple traditional piety has not yet been completely ousted by intellectual dissociations— the faithful not only went to church, but they brought with them the gifts of creation: bread, wine, and oil. And these gifts were carried in liturgical procession (in parade) to arrive in the hands of the Bishop, who was waiting at the entrance (the current “Great Entrance” of the Divine Liturgy) and who would offer them to God as Eucharist.

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Rather than forgetting temporal needs by going to church (as one might perhaps expect), the Divine Liturgy requires the faithful to make their contribution and to pray for “seasonable weather, an abundance of the fruits of the earth, for those who are at sea, for travelers, and for the sick,” for the defeat of the enemies of the State, for victory for the king, and so forth. So, too, is the collection— this apparent scandal for certain pious individuals—an act that reveals that what takes place during the Divine Liturgy is precisely a journey, a ceremonious display of the whole world before the holy altar. Bringing the world as it is with them, the faithful receive a foretaste of paradise, an eschatological glimpse of the world as it will be, and then they are called once again to “go in peace” back into the world. This experience of the journey of the whole human life toward the place of the liturgy does not ignore the fact that because of sin the world is not the “very good” reality that God saw at the moment of creation. Sin is a tragic element which returns to the consciousness of the celebrating Church on several occasions: “None of those who are bound by the desires and pleasures of the flesh is worthy to come to You, to approach You, and to render You this worship, O King of glory . . .” But in the Divine Liturgy sin is not a distressing and unsolved problem of the world. The corruption that follows creation is neither remarked upon nor denied in the liturgy—though I will not comment further at the moment on this dilemma). However, the world that enters the liturgical space is the fallen world, and this entry immediately highlights its ontological importance. But there is more. This world does not enter into the Church in order to remain there as it is. The liturgy is “a medicine of immortality”1 precisely because in its acceptance and affirmation of the world, it refuses its corruption and sanctifies its offering to the Creator: “We offer to You these gifts from Your own gifts in all and for all.” This acceptance of the world through the Divine Liturgy shows that in the liturgical vision of creation, the world has never ceased to be the cosmos of God, that sin and destruction are not merely the design of an inferior deity (or demiurge)—as in the thought of Marcion (and, indeed, von Harnack!)—but that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we want in the world can and

1

Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 20:2.

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must pass through the hands of the celebrant as an offering to God. Not in order that it might remain as it is; not in order that it might be transformed into something other than creation. But to undo the distortion caused by sin and to become what it truly is. Paradoxically, then, the Divine Liturgy both affirms and negates the world, for the Eucharist is the transformation of the world (that is not its destruction) and the renewal of the world (that is not its creation ex nihilo). In this way, the Eucharist manifests the very mystery of Christ in space and time, the mystery in which the old Adam is renewed without being destroyed, wherein human nature is assumed without being changed, and where the human is deified without ceasing to be human. The vision of the world through the Eucharistic experience leaves no possibility for dissociating the natural from the supernatural, thereby avoiding the dilemma in which Western theology is stiflingly locked. In my opinion, this facilitates the opening of the Church to the contemporary world, which finds this natural-supernatural distinction very difficult, if not impossible. For on account of developments in science and philosophy, it no longer understands the supernatural as “beyond” nature. Yet, under the weight of this dichotomy inherited from Western theology, the Christian mind has been led either to the complete negation of the supernatural or to an internal dissociation (that is to say to a state of disengagement) that sometimes accepts the supernatural (in order not to betray the faith) and at other times pays it no notice (in day-to-day life). Now, for the liturgical vision of the world, there is no distinction between natural and supernatural. What exists is the single reality of nature and creation—even to the point of the identification of earthly and heavenly reality—as we chant in the Cherubic Hymn: “We who mystically represent the Cherubim . . . .” In the Eucharistic encounter, God Himself cannot be understood as “beyond” nature because, in the person of His Son, He became the one “enthroned on high with the Father and also invisibly present here with us.” Thus, the Eucharist can save us from the dissociation that drives people today to deny God—the God that theology has placed in a sphere incomprehensible to moderns. The Eucharistic vision of the world eliminates another false opposition placed before us by Gnostic and Hellenistic theology: namely, the opposition between eternity and time. In the Eucharist, history and time—usually understood either as an evil human

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obligation or as the antechamber of eternity—intersect with eternity. Consequently eternity ceases to be “before” or “after” time and becomes exactly the dimension into which time can open. In this way we become contemporaries of the whole history of God’s pre-eternal plan for our salvation in a unity of past, present, and future that allows the full acceptance and sanctification of time and history. As we pray in the Divine Liturgy: Remembering this command of the Savior, and all that came to pass for our sake, the cross, the tomb, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, the enthronement at the right hand of the Father, and the second glorious coming, we offer to you these gifts from your own gifts in all and for all. All of this might very well form a fundamental answer to certain contemporary expectations.

The Eucharist as Anthropology The Orthodox liturgical life still has its own vision of humanity that seems to match the needs of modern humanity. From their centuries-old theological tradition of the West, contemporary persons have inherited the anguish of its dichotomy between body and soul, or mind and matter, as well as the dilemma of choosing between the two, because the purely spiritual is incomprehensible. In contrast, the Orthodox liturgical life pays very close attention to the body and its needs—to the point that the bread and the wine are identified with the Lord Himself, the wood and colors become icons of saints, and the relics of the saints also express a sanctifying personal presence. In this tradition, humans participate as a whole and not by closing their eyes—reflective of the Western model of piety where one encounters God in an allegedly immaterial relationship, which is at base merely a psychological relationship. Yet how does such a denial of the unity of the human creature correspond at all with the thought of those who have ceased—and who can blame them?—to think according to the anthropological categories of Aristotle and Plato? Rather than protecting human integrity, this psychologized form of the Eucharist is yet another factor leading to a fundamental crisis of conscience and life.

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We emphasized earlier—indeed, we have always emphasized— that the Holy Eucharist is not the place in which each one encounters God in a merely “vertical” relationship. The Eucharist is essentially a social and ecclesial act, and it has been preserved—more or less experienced—this way in the East. There is perhaps no other event of ecclesial existence in which Christians cease to be individual believers and become Church communicants. In the Eucharist, prayer, faith, love, and charity—that is to say, everything that the faithful practice individually—cease to be “mine” or “yours” and become “ours.” The entire relationship of humanity with God becomes the relationship of God with His people, with His Church. The Eucharist is not only communion between each person and Christ; it is also communion among the faithful themselves and unity in the body of Christ—“not many bodies, but one body,” according to St. John Chrysostom’s faithful interpretation. Thus, the biblical truth that sums up the path to God and implies a true path toward the neighbor is especially alive in the Eucharist, which is the most anti-individualistic act of the Church. In this way, the human ceases to be an individual and becomes a person—that is to say, a reality which is not a fragment, the appendix of a machine or of an organization directed at its own goal—even if this is the most sacred objective of an abstract collectivism. The person is not a means toward an end; the person himself or herself is the goal, the image and likeness of God that finds its fulfillment in communion with God and with other persons. Contemporary humans live every day under the weight of the opposition or distinction between the individual and the collective. Their social life is not communio, but societas. And because there is no other choice, their violent reaction against collectivism leads to individualism, and vice versa—since, paradoxically, the one presupposes the other. Our Christian tradition generally has not provided contemporary humans with an anthropology that would substantiate them as persons because, even in the Church, humans were sometimes seen through the lenses of dualism and collectivism. In contrast, the liturgy presupposes—and at the same time leads toward—an anthropology that understands humanity to be “a new creation in Christ.” The liturgy is not theology; it does not specify; it shows and reveals. To the question “What is humanity?” it responds by showing Christ as the human par excellence—that is to say, as the human united to God and deified.

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In the communion “of holy things” offered “to the holy ones,” the compass is magnetized immediately toward the One praised in the Great Doxology: “You alone are Holy, You alone are Lord, Jesus Christ” in whom humanity, through Holy Communion, becomes what it truly is: namely, catholic humanity.

The Eucharist as Ethics Such is the experience of those participating in the Divine Liturgy. But what happens when they “go in peace” and return to the world? We used to say that humanity drew upon divine—or supernatural— powers through the sacrament of the Eucharist, which would help in the struggle against sin. Regardless of this transfusion of power, the Eucharist—as action and as community—gives the full and concrete meaning of the moral life. Our theological tradition has transformed ethics into a system of rules and an independent field of theology. Thus certain forms of conduct have become disembodied and absolute dogmas—related neither to diverse historical contexts nor to human diversity—that repeatedly judge and morally condemn the world. Under this influence the relationship between man and God became a legal or contractual relationship, in accordance with an old temptation of the West. In contrast with this tradition, the Eucharistic vision of the world and society neither permits nor admits an autonomy of ethics or its reduction to absolute legal rules. Rather, it holds that the moral life follows from the transformation and renewal of humanity in Christ, so that every moral commandment appears and is understood only as a consequence of this sacramental transformation. In such a vision of ethics—for example, that found in St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians—moral conduct is understood as a continuation of the liturgical experience: “So if you have been raised with Christ, put to death whatever in you is earthly. You have stripped off the old self with its practices and have put on the clothes of the new self, which is being renewed” (Col. 3:1–5, 9–10). We should note that the terms “to strip off” and “to put on” here are liturgical terms that are especially— like all the terminology of this passage—linked to the experience of the sacrament of baptism. It is for this reason that the Divine Liturgy recognizes only one kind of moral terminology—namely, the sanctification of souls and bodies—so that, in communion with “the

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Blessed Virgin and all the Saints,” we might entrust “ourselves, and one another, and all our life to Christ our God.” In this way, the Eucharist does not offer the world a system of moral rules, but a transfigured and sanctified society—a leaven that will lead the entire creation by a sanctifying presence, and not by the compulsion of moral commandments. This witnessing presence does not forge intolerable chains, but invites them to the freedom of the children of God, to a communion with God that will bring rebirth. Contemporary humans seem—utterly and indignantly—to reject the moral rules imposed for centuries by a Christian civilization. Putting to one side the causes of this situation, let us merely note that the structure that we have built with our good moral values with so much zeal is now perceived as a human prison that threatens to ruin its very foundations. Why the moral decadence in secular society? Why does our Christian voice resound as if in a vacuum? We have turned to moral preaching and to statements of moral principles in an effort to convince the world, and we have failed; no one hears us. We offered the Word and the world did not accept it. We forget that the Word is not our words, but a Person; not a pronouncement, but a living Presence. This is precisely the personal presence that is embodied in the Eucharist, which is above all communion and assembly. This society, which was transfigured in order to transfigure, no longer exists. It was dissolved by our pious individualism, which believed that, in order to prove effective in the world, it had no need for the parish, for the Eucharistic community. So it replaced them with an “instructive logocracy,” believing that it would be sufficient to tell the world to change. The presence of our Church in the world has become a pulpit without a sanctuary, a group of Christians with neither unity nor community. We do not draw our moral attitudes from the new life that we enjoy at the Eucharistic assembly. And society has thereby lost the leaven of the divine communion that alone can spark an authentic revival.

The Eucharist as Eschaton We do not wish to imply that a Eucharistic vision will provide a solution to the moral problems of our society. Instead, it should be noted that in such a vision there is no place for the “opium” of

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a “social gospel.” Waiting for the terrestrial paradise of a morally perfect society is a creation of Western rationalism that cannot be deduced from the witness of the Eucharist. For the Eucharist, in its innermost nature, has an eschatological dimension: although it enters into history, it is not transformed entirely into history. It is the most dramatic evidence of a meeting in human existence here and now between the eschaton and history, between the perfect and the relative. The Eucharist is witness to a morality that is not an historical evolution but an ontological grace, acquired only to be lost again, until on the last day it is be acquired definitively. This eschatological invasion is not an historical development that one can comprehend logically and by experience; it is the descent of the Holy Spirit through the act of invocation (epiclesis)— an invocation that is so fundamental and so characteristic of the Orthodox Eucharist—that transfigures the “present age” and transforms it in Christ into “a new creation.” This descent from heaven to earth, which in turn makes possible the ascent of the earth to the heavenly throne, fills the earth with light, with grace, and with joy, rendering the feast of the Divine Liturgy a solemn celebration from which the faithful return to the world full of joy and charisma. But in crossing the threshold of the Church, they discover an unabated struggle. Until the end of time, they must pursue in their Eucharistic journey, receiving only a taste of the divine communion that is soon mingled with the bitter taste of evil. The Eucharist has given them the strongest assurance of the victory of Christ over death and the devil. However, on this earth, the victory will ever be a victory of “kenosis,” the victory of the cross, the victory of heroic ascesis—as this has been understood and experienced in Eastern monasticism. Therefore, the Eucharist will always open the way not to the dream of a gradual perfection of the world, but to the demand for heroic ascesis, an experience of kenosis and of the cross. This is the only way in which it is possible to live the Eucharist in the world until the victory of the resurrection at the end of time. At the same time, the Eucharist offers the world the experience of this eschatological dimension that penetrates history in the Eucharistic communion and makes possible our deification in space and time. Without this dimension, no missionary method, no intelligent diplomacy (or dialogue with the world), and no system of morality will transfigure the contemporary world into Christ.

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The Eucharist as Hope Without a doubt, the crisis of the relationship between contemporary humanity and Christ, along with the incapacity of Christianity to engage with contemporary humanity, is due in large part to the debased theological tradition that we teach. This tradition has alienated humanity, rendered us dissociated, and stifled us with dualistic conceptions and moralistic constructions. In brief, it has destroyed the integrity of the human being. Given this situation, the Orthodox Church is doomed to failure if it restricts its theological witness to such a tradition. If, instead, the Orthodox Church resolves the contemporary dichotomies in the Eucharist, it will prove liturgically to be the hope of the world, where humanity finds its integrity in communion with God. When the Orthodox Church becomes aware of the Eucharistic vision that it conceals, and that will lead it to creative theological revisions and renewed practice, then it will save itself from secularization and the world from seclusion from God.

9 Proprietors or Priests of Creation?

The development of ecological awareness and sensitivity in the past years has led to the use of various models of speaking about the relationship of the human being to nature. The prevailing one among these models is that of steward—that is to say, speaking of the human being as the steward of creation. This terminology has become widespread not only among secular but also among religious ecologists, and perhaps especially among the latter. We encounter it in almost every reference to the ecological problem by theologians. The idea of stewardship is a useful one mainly from the point of view of what it intends to exclude—namely, the notion that the human being is the lord and proprietor of creation. Such an understanding of the human being as a proprietor of creation has found support in modern times predominantly in two areas: the anthropology of the Enlightenment and Western (particularly Protestant) theology. The Enlightenment found its typical representatives in this respect in such thinkers as René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and even Immanuel Kant. In the words of Descartes, the development of science would make human beings “maîtres et possesseurs de la nature,” while Francis Bacon in an almost brutal way invites humanity to treat nature as its “slave.” Kant, on the other hand, understood humanity’s relationship to nature as that of a “judge,” whose function is to exercise rational and moral judgment on nature, directing it in accordance with what the human being considers to be right or wrong, good or bad for it. Protestant theology, on the other hand, particularly in the Calvinist tradition, did its best to exploit the biblical verse “Subdue

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and have dominion over the earth” (Gen. 1:28) in order to promote, whether directly or indirectly, capitalist views of work and consumerist concepts of economy, as Max Weber has demonstrated so clearly. Without the advancement of such religious ideas the appearance of the ecological crisis would probably be difficult to explain historically. Now, the replacement of the model of “proprietor” and “possessor” with that of “steward of creation” may be useful in order to exclude the undoubtedly unacceptable view that the human being is the lord of creation or may behave as such a lord. Ecologists recognized this and conveniently adopted the model of stewardship. However, a closer examination of this model would reveal its limitations and disadvantages from the ecological viewpoint. Thus: (a) Stewardship implies a managerial approach to nature. The Greek word oikonomos, which stands behind the notion of steward, points to the capacity of the human being to “manage” a given “property” and make “use” of it, albeit within the limits of what has been “entrusted” to humanity. In this sense stewardship resembles what the English mean by the function of a “trustee.” A utilitarian implication in the relation of the human being to nature seems to underlie this model. Equally significant is the underlying conception of nature as a “thing” and an “object” to be managed, arranged, rearranged, distributed, and consumed by the human being. (b) Stewardship also suggests a more conservationist attitude to nature. The steward is the “guardian” of what is given to him or her; a steward is called to conserve creation, albeit, as I have just noted, while managing it. However, this conservationist approach to our relation to nature seems to overlook two important truths. On the one hand, the human being is not called only to “guard” but also to “cultivate” nature—that is, to improve its capacities and help it grow or bring forth fruit. On the other hand, human intervention has already reached such proportions that it would be unrealistic and futile to speak of sheer conservation of the environment. Certain parts of the environment may still be capable of conservation, but other parts have undergone irrevocable changes, and so any attempt to preserve them would be unrealistic, in some cases even undesirable.

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Consequently the idea of stewardship, much as it is useful to indicate our objection to the view that the human being is the lord and proprietor of creation—a view that accounts historically to a considerable degree for the appearance of the ecological crisis— has its own limitations and would appear to be problematic from the ecological point of view. It may, therefore, be necessary to complement it with another model, namely with what we may describe as the priest of creation. Such a model seems to emerge naturally from the patristic and liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church, but its existential meaning is universal. The word “priest” forms part of religious language and for this reason it may appear to have a significance limited only to religious people. Nonetheless, we shall try to show that this is not so. But in order to do that we must first clarify our anthropological presuppositions. Otherwise, we cannot tackle the idea of man— in the sense of anthropos, as both male and female.1 What, then, is the being that we call “man”? It is not only theology that tries to answer this question, but also science and philosophy. Although each of these three disciplines has something different to say, they cannot but also have something common on this matter. Otherwise there would be no common ground and, therefore, no possibility for dialogue among them. For science—and for biology in particular—the human being is very closely connected with what we call animals; he or she is another animal. This view has prevailed in biology ever since Darwin produced his theory of evolution. Although this may sound rather disturbing to theologians, we must bear in mind, as we will see later, that it is important for all of us to remember this connection of the human being with the rest of the animals.2 Biology approaches the human being as another animal with higher qualities than those of the rest of the animals, but also with many things in common, including intelligence and consciousness. Attributes such as these used to be attached exclusively to human beings in the past. But for biological scientists today, the human being is, in a certain sense, basically an animal.

This generic, rather than gendered application of the term “man” is how it is used in this book. 2 See Chapter 14. 1

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Philosophy tries to offer a different view of the human being. Although it admits that the human being is an animal, it distinguishes man from the animals in one important way. In the past, philosophers made this distinction by saying that humans were specially characterized by intelligence or rationality. However, ever since Darwin showed that intelligence can also be found in other animals, and that the difference is only a matter of degree and not of kind, philosophy no longer insists on rationality as the special characteristic of man. The difference seems now to lie in the fact that, whereas other animals adjust to the given world—sometimes even managing that very well, much better in fact than the human being—the human being wants to create its own world, to use the existing world in order to make something specifically human out of it. This is why the human being produces tools of its own, which are used in order to exploit nature. But more significantly, it treats nature as the raw material from which it creates new realities, as is evident particularly in the case of art. Only the human being can see a tree, for example, and make another tree out of that, a tree which is “his” or “her” tree, bearing the personal seal of the person who painted or sculptured it. Thus it is creativity that characterizes the human being, and this is something we cannot find in the animals. Man is a creative being. This proves to be very important, as we shall see here, for ecology as well. In his attempt to be creative and to create his own world, man is normally frustrated, because he tends and wishes to create, as God does, out of nothing, but also to be fully free from what is given to him as his environment—namely, his “world.” It is because the human being has this tendency to use the natural world for his own purposes that he can prove both good and bad for creation. The human being can exploit creation in such a way as to subject it to himself, thereby causing the natural environment to suffer under his dominion. All this indicates that what distinguishes the human being from the rest of the animals is freedom expressed as creativity, as the free creation of something new. There are two ideas here to remember which will be very important for our subject. The first we draw from biological science, and that is that the human being is organically and inseparably linked with the natural world, particularly with the animals. The second is that, although he is united with the rest of creation, man tends to rise above creation and make use of it in a

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freeway, whether by creating something new or sometimes simply by destroying what is “given” to him. With these thoughts from science and philosophy in mind, let us now ask what theology thinks the human being is. For theology, the human being is not only related to the rest of creation, but also to another factor, which science does not want to introduce, while philosophy sometimes does, but very often does not. I am referring to the factor that we call God. For theology, God is crucial in order to know what the human being is. The human being must emerge as something different, as a different identity with regard to the animals, with regard to the rest of creation, and also with regard to God. Thus man is a link between God and the world. This is what is expressed in theological terms through the concept of the “image and likeness of God.” In the Bible, when man was created, God said: “Let us now create man in our image and likeness.” But what does this mean? What does it mean that the human being is an image of God? This has been discussed over many centuries, and I do not wish to burden the reader with all this complex discussion. Instead, I will simply mention that one of the elements that the Church Fathers saw as expressing this “image of God” in man is rationality (logos). Man is a logikon zoon (“a rational living being”), and it is through his rationality that he reflects the being of God in creation. However, logos or “rationality” had a particular meaning in earlier times, and this had mainly to do with the capacity of the human being to collect what is diversified and even fragmented in the world in order to make a unified and harmonious world (cosmos) out of that disorder (chaos). Rationality was not, as it later came to be understood, simply a capacity to reason with one’s mind. Instead, as the ancient Greeks thought of logos, it is man’s capacity to achieve the unity of the world and to make a cosmos out of it. In this regard, man has the capacity to unite the world. There is also another element that was stressed by the Church Fathers as expressing the “image of God.” This is what Gregory of Nyssa calls the autexousion—namely, the freedom of the human being. The animals do not have a logos in the sense of acquiring a universal grasp of reality, nor do they enjoy freedom from the laws of nature. By contrast, the human being has to some extent both of these things, and that is very important for man in order to serve, as we shall see, as the priest of creation.

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Another aspect of the image of God in man—or rather, another aspect of what man is or represents for theology, particularly Orthodox and patristic thought—is that man is the “prince of creation” and the “microcosm” of the whole of creation. One of the Fathers of the Church who wrote in the seventh century, St. Maximus the Confessor, developed this idea in particular. Maximus believed that in the human being we have the whole world present; man is a sort of microcosm of the whole universe. Because the human being has this organic link with creation and at the same time the drive to unite creation and to be free from the laws of nature, he can therefore also act as the “priest of creation.” The priest is the one who freely and—himself an organic part of creation—takes the world in his hands in order to refer it to God, in return bringing God’s blessing on the world. Through this act, creation is brought into communion with God Himself. This is the essence of priesthood, and it is only the human being who can unite the world in his hands in order to refer it to God, so that in turn it can be united with God and thus saved and fulfilled. This is so because, as we previously noted, only the human being is united with creation while at the same time being able to transcend it through freedom. This role of the human being as the priest of creation is absolutely necessary for creation itself, because without this referral of creation to God the whole created universe will die. It will decay and disappear because it is a finite universe, as most scientists accept today. This is theologically a very fundamental belief, since the world was not always there, but came into being at some point and, for this reason, will “naturally” have an end and come into nonbeing one day. Therefore, the only way to protect the world from its finitude, which is inherent in its nature, is to bring it into relation with God. This is because God is the only infinite, immortal being, and it is only by relating to God that the world can overcome its natural finitude and its natural mortality. In other words, when God created the world finite—and, therefore, subject by nature to death and mortality—He wanted this world to live forever, to be united with Him, and to be in communion with Him. It is precisely for this reason that God created the human being. This underlines the significance of man as the priest of creation, who would unite the world and relate it to God in order that it may live forever.

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Unfortunately, the human being did not perform this function, and herein lies for theology the root of the ecological problem. The human being was tempted to make himself the ultimate point of reference. By replacing God with himself—namely, a finite created being—man condemned the world to finitude and mortality, decay and death. In other words, the human being rejected his role as the priest of creation by making himself God in creation. This is what we call in theology the “Fall of man.” When this occurred, God did not want the world to die and brought about a way of restoring this lost communion between Creator and creation. The Incarnation of the Son of God was precisely about this restoration of all things. Christ is the one who came in order to do what Adam did not do—namely, to be the priest of creation. Through his death and resurrection, Christ aimed precisely at this unity and communion of the whole of creation with God, by redirecting or referring creation back to God once again. It is for this reason that Christ is called the “second Adam,” or the “last Adam,” and that his work is seen as the “recapitulation” (anakephalaiosis) of all that exists—that is, of all things and of the entire creation. Now it is this role, which Christ performed personally through the cross and resurrection that He assigned to the Church, which is His Body. The Church is there precisely in order to act as the priest of creation, uniting the world and referring it back to God, thereby bringing it into communion with God. This phenomenon takes place in the Church particularly through the sacraments. The meaning of the sacraments, for example that of baptism, is that through them the attitude of the fallen Adam is reversed. Man dies to his claim to be God in creation, and instead recognizes God as the Lord of all creation. Through the path of asceticism, the Church educates man to sacrifice his own will and self-centeredness in order to subject himself freely to the will of God, thus demonstrating that he has reversed the attitude of the first Adam. Finally, through the Eucharist, the Church proclaims and realizes precisely this priestly function of humanity. The Eucharist consists in taking elements from the natural world—the bread and the wine which represent the created material world—and bringing them into the hands of the human being, the hands of Christ who is the man par excellence and the priest of creation, in order ultimately to refer them to the Creator God.

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At this point, it is important to remember—especially those of us who belong to the Orthodox Church and are familiar with the Divine Liturgy—that the central point in our liturgy is when the priest exclaims: “Your own of Your own we offer to You.” This means that the world (the creation) is recognized as belonging to God and is consequently referred back to him. This action is precisely the reversal of the attitude of Adam, who took the world as his own and referred it to himself. In the Eucharist, the Church does exactly the opposite: the world belongs to God and we refer it back to its Creator through the priestly action of Christ as the real and true man, as the head of the Body of the Church. Let us now look briefly at the ecological significance of all this: 1. The understanding of the human being as priest rather than steward of creation means that the role of man in creation is neither passive (conservationist) nor managerial (economic). It should be noted here that the notion of “economy” is deeply linked with that of management—namely, the idea of arranging things according to and for the sake of expediency, not only in political but also in ecclesiastical language. The human being is related to nature not functionally, as the idea of stewardship would suggest, but ontologically: by being the steward of creation the human being relates to nature by what he or she does, whereas by being the priest of creation the human being relates to nature by what he or she is. The implications of this distinction are very significant. In the case of stewardship, our attitude to nature is determined by ethics and morality: if we destroy nature we disobey and transgress a certain law, as a result, we become immoral and unethical. In the case of priesthood, in destroying nature we simply cease to be; the consequences of ecological sin are not moral but existential. Ecology is therefore a matter of our esse, not of our bene esse. Our ecological concern becomes in this way far more powerful and efficient than if we employ the model of stewardship. 2. The idea of priest of creation gives to ecology a cultural dimension. The word “culture” here must be taken in its deepest meaning, which is the elevation of an otherwise transitory and ephemeral entity to something of lasting and

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even eternal value. When an artist creates, he or she wishes to bring about something of eternal value and significance. The priest is in this sense an artist: he takes the material world in his hands—the bread and the wine, for example, in the case of the Eucharist, which are perishable by nature— and lifts it up so that it may acquire eternal, divine meaning. In such an approach the entire raison d’être of ecology undergoes a profound change. We do not ask people to respect the environment simply for negative reasons, such as the fear of destruction; this would be an ecology based on fear. We ask people to take a positive view of ecology, something like an attitude of love toward nature. As priests rather than stewards we embrace nature instead of managing it. And while this may sound romantic and sentimental, its deeper meaning is, as we have already stated, ontological, since this “embracing” of nature amounts to our being and our very existence. 3. Such a cultural dimension of ecology implies that the protection of nature is not contrary to the development of nature. The human being is the priest of creation in the sense that the material world he takes in his hands is transformed into something better than what it is naturally. Nature must be improved through human intervention; it is not merely to be preserved as it is. In the Eucharist we do not offer to God simply grain or wheat and grapes, but bread and wine—that is to say, natural elements developed and transformed through the human labor, in our own hands. Ecology is not preservation but development. The model of priest is in this sense far more suggestive and rich than the model of stewardship. It does not, however, bring us back to the model of proprietor, since in the case of priesthood the development of nature through the intermediary of the human hands does not end up with the human being and its interests, but is referred back to God in an act of thanksgiving. Ecology and development have always been, as we all know, two terms that require some kind of reconciliation. There is always the fear among developing countries that ecology has somehow been “invented” as a means of keeping them underdeveloped. This is

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indeed the case if the development of nature has as its ultimate purpose the satisfaction of human needs. But in the priestly approach to nature we are able to develop nature not so much in order to satisfy our needs as human beings, but because nature itself stands in need of development through us in order to fulfill its own being and acquire a meaning which it would not otherwise have. In other words, there is a development of nature that treats it as raw material for production and distribution, and there is a development of nature which treats it as an entity that must be developed for its own sake. In the latter case, although the human being is not passive, simply preserving or sustaining nature, he is nevertheless developing nature with respect for its—and not his own—interests, taking care of its fragility and becoming aware of its “groaning in travail,” to remember St. Paul’s moving expression in Rom. 8:22. I have tried to describe the model of priest of creation in its ecological significance. I hope that I have shown some of the advantages that this model may have for ecology compared with other models, especially that of stewardship. I am fully aware of the fact that the way things are going with regard to ecology, none of these models would save us. I nevertheless think that the moralistic approach to the ecological problems expressed through such words as “responsibility” and so on has to be complemented with a cultural approach. Our ecological crisis is due not so much to a deficient ethic as to a defective ethos; it is a cultural problem. In our Western culture we have done everything to desacralize life, filling our societies with legislators, moralists, and thinkers. We have undermined the fact that the human being is also, or rather primarily, a liturgical being, faced from the moment of birth with a world that he or she must treat either as a sacred gift or as raw material for exploitation and use. We are all born priests, and unless we remain so throughout our lives we are bound to suffer the ecological consequences we are now experiencing. We must allow the idea of priest of creation to reenter our culture and affect our ethos. For, an ethic which is not rooted in ethos is of little use to ecology.



IV

Ecological Ethics or Ecological Ethos?



10 Ethics or Ethos? A Brief Sketch

The Relationship between Ecology and Ethics Owing to a growing awareness of the impending environmental catastrophe, the Church is waking up to its past and present responsibilities, while it is being gradually accepted that science cannot solve the problem alone—it needs people’s cooperation, and religion has a vital role to play there. We need to remember, however, that secular ethics can function in the absence of religious ethics. Ethics is the evaluation of behavior on the basis of the good, or right, or of what makes for happiness. Plato identified the good with the beautiful—aesthetics. Bad was what originally disturbed the harmony of the cosmos. In the Roman period in the West, right and good became one concept, and thus rationality emerged as the focal concept. Subsequently, in the Middle Ages, in accordance with ideas that originated with the Stoics, the good and the right came to be identified with natural law and this “back to nature” idea is still with us today, when the pursuit of happiness has become an ideal of Western culture—even enshrined in the US Constitution—and thus what is desirable has become good. In this regard, ethics has become responsible for the ecological problem. Utilitarianism and the pursuit of happiness have led to the exploitation of the world’s

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resources by making something good simply because it makes people happy. Nonetheless, there is no ethical critique that can compel us to behave in an ecological way. Ethical conflicts arise all the time— for instance, you have to choose between closing a polluting factory or keeping people employed and fed. It is ecology versus starvation. For solutions we need the consent of the people. So we must revise our ethics. We must move from an anthropomonistic ethics to a more cosmic ethics. Human beings are a part of the natural cosmos, and thus their salvation is a part of the salvation of the cosmos. There are two key questions that emerge here: 1. Can human beings be saved without the material world being saved as well? A theological problem is created by taking the view that only human beings survive at the eschaton and that neither animals nor the rest of creation does. But we cannot dissociate ourselves from the rest of creation history—Darwin demonstrated this very clearly and emphatically to the world—and so we cannot divorce ourselves from creation in salvation history. 2. Can the material world exist without human beings? Does it have any validity without human beings? The presence of the human as the validating factor is not a theological doctrine, but natural scientists and natural philosophers assume it to be such. We need to move from this utilitarian ethic to a more self-sacrificial ethic. We need to recognize that we may have to lose our health, and, indeed, even our life, for the sake of creation as a whole. We must be ready— like Christ, who died for the whole of creation—to sacrifice our happiness. And so we must move from the ethics of domination to the ethics of priesthood. There is a strong distinction between ethos and ethics: ethos is applied within a culture and presupposes community, whereas ethics operate on the basis of principles and are rooted in systems of thought. The Orthodox tradition can contribute the following three elements of ethos—or custom, or the accepted way—to produce such a cosmic or priestly dimension of ethics. Briefly put, we would propose:

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A Liturgical Ethos Especially a Eucharistic ethos—namely, referring creation back to God (“Your own of Your own we offer to You”), which entails ●●

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transforming matter into something holy, valued of itself and for its own sake, and sharing the material world and communicating with each other thereby.

An Iconographic Ethos ●●

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Making matter transparent, where its existence or presence points beyond itself, and raising the aesthetic of the material world to the level of a person.

An Ascetic Ethos ●●

Fasting, which demonstrates the limits of consumption.

The ecological problem requires not just a prescribed code of behavior but a radical rediscovery of culture as the accepted way of being. The Church no longer seems sure as to whether it can influence culture. However, we must apply the Orthodox ethos in a culturally creative way as well as explore the human body and the entire created world as a vehicle of communion with God and with others.

11 Toward an Environmental Ethic

Introduction It is a great pleasure and a distinct honor to deliver to this address as we sail along the Adriatic coast, a geographic area of immense cultural significance as well as enormous environmental problems.1 It is precisely in an area like this that the question is inevitably raised in our minds: Why and how has humankind reached such a deplorable situation, in which its most beautiful cultural achievements can exist side by side—though for how long, we may wonder!—with the worst and saddest environmental destruction? How is it possible that the same human being can create an admirable culture and destroy the natural environment at the same time? Are we not faced with a conflicted situation that must signal alarm to our conscience? Religion and science cannot evade this question, for they share a great deal of responsibility both for the appearance of this lamentable situation and for finding ways to correct it. As religious leaders and distinguished scientists, we are gathered here precisely for this reason. The first thing that emerges from what we have just said is that we all stand in need of repentance. In an earlier address to the first of our symposia,2 I spoke about the urgent need to revise our traditional This chapter was originally delivered as the keynote presentation during the Fourth International Symposium organized under the joint auspices of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, in June 2002. 2 See Chapter 2. 1

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concept of sin so as to make it include the sin not only against our fellow humans but also the natural world. The words I used at that time were the following: “We are used to regarding sin mainly in social terms. But there is also sin against nature. Evil is not a matter for human beings alone, but it affects the entire creation. This morality still awaits its proper place in our Christian consciences.” This is a fundamental prerequisite of all ethics, namely the consciousness of sin. Sin is not an exclusively religious notion. It does not necessarily require an external forensic authority such as God or the law—whether moral, civil, or other. It can be understood, as in the case of the Orthodox Christian tradition, as a failure to achieve an end—an astochia, which means missing the mark. The human being was created with a purpose which in the Christian Orthodox tradition is called divinization (theosis). Man was created “in order to till and care for” the earth, according to the book of Genesis (2:15). There was a purpose in the creation of the human being. And it is the human failure to fulfill this purpose that constitutes the essence of sin. This takes away the juridical and forensic character attached to sin, particularly in the Western Christian tradition, mainly since St. Augustine, and places it on the ontological level, which relates to the human being rather than to mere action, to existence rather than just behavior. This is important for any attempt to work out an environmental ethic. An ethic which is based on what the human being does is very different from an ethic founded on what the human being is. It is important, therefore, to establish our environmental ethics on existential rather than moral grounds—that is, by looking primarily not into the human actions but into human attitudes, into an existential orientation that leads to a certain ethical behavior. It is only on such a basis that an environmental ethic can demand universal persuasion and acceptance, something that is so necessary in the case of an ethic of this kind.

Ethics or Ethos As we have already intimated, there is a fundamental difference between ethics and ethos which affects directly the subject of the environment. Putting it simply, ethics has to do with principles worked out consciously or even rationally, and perhaps even intellectually; whereas ethos relates to symbols, emerging from

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shared everyday experience in a particular community. Such symbols unite a particular community in a certain common attitude toward life, thereby giving expression, and even form, to the very “way of being” (tropos hyparxeos), to how people live in relation to everything that exists. In this sense ethos is spontaneous and not conscious behavior; it is the fundamental preconscious substratum of all culture—something that is taught, not intellectually but through the acceptance of the worldview into which a human being is brought without any intellectual effort from the very moment of his or her birth. Viewed in this way, ethos requires two conditions in order to exist. The first is a community united around a common worldview. The second is symbols through which this common worldview is shared, expressed, and communicated within the community. Without these conditions ethos results in sheer custom or practice, which can be easily abstracted as individual behavior and become prone to intellectual criticism before finally being dismissed. The function of symbol is crucial here because it guarantees that ethos would remain communal in character—the preposition sym in the word “symbol” makes it impossible to conceive symbol individually. It also implies participation through means borrowed from ordinary practical experience in a reality that transcends praxis into being— that is, into the way we exist in relation to all that exists. Thus symbol is what protects praxis from falling into activism—namely, into an ethic of doing without being, with no ontological basis or content whatsoever. Contrasted with this, ethics is traditionally dissociated from ethos in that it claims an authority based on imperatives drawn from reason—that is, from a conscious consideration of what is right. This proves to be the weak point of ethics in that the answer to the question of “What is right?” depends eventually on the worldview one holds. For example, in a Platonist and in a broader ancient Greek worldview, right is what does justice to the cosmos, beauty, and harmony of the universe, which is to be reflected in human behavior. To the Roman mind and its subsequent development in Western culture, right is what is useful and simply does no harm. The latter approach is essentially utilitarian. It is also determined by what nature dictates—namely, acting according to nature (kata physin)—since in a sense nature contrasted with human arbitrariness somehow manages to avoid doing harm and

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produces useful results. Finally, in our postmodern pluralism, right seems to depend on particular contexts and situations that may be totally unrelated to one another both spatially and temporally. All this shows that a pure ethic which is not somehow rooted in ethos is conceivable theoretically but can have no significance practically. We may teach people what is ethically right to do, but in order to have this applied in their lives it would be necessary to insert it into their ethos. All this is particularly relevant to the question of the environment. Why does ethics play such an insignificant role in the attitude of our contemporary societies toward the natural environment? Why are people so unethical today with respect to nature? Is it because modern societies are unethical in general? Is it because there is no such a thing as ethics taught at school and assumed in the way our societies are structured? On the contrary, ethics seems to occupy a central place in Western societies, but it is a kind of ethics that has been disassociated from ethos; a deep separation has occurred between what ethics teaches at the level of knowledge and what people spontaneously do in their everyday life as a result of the worldview into which they are born and raised up. We therefore need an environmental ethic, but what sort of ethic should that be? These questions bring us to the heart of the problem we are dealing with. To some of us the purpose of our dealing with the subject of environmental ethics is to enrich the existing ethics with some clauses which will invite people to behave better toward the natural environment. Allow me, however, to cast doubt on whether such a thing would be worth our while. There are certainly many things to be added to the ethics taught at schools or in churches about the respect we owe to our natural environment. Some of them have already been proposed by declarations such as the Earth Charter, or by institutions such as the United Nations, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and others. The various symposia organized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate have also submitted suggestions for the formation of an ethical code for the environment. Nonetheless, I believe that as religious leaders and scientists we must delve deeper into the issue. We must be ready to propose not simply an ethic but an ethos, and to root our ethical demands deep in human existence and not simply in human behavior. We must be prepared to ask not simply how people should behave, but why they must behave in a certain way. What are the compelling reasons

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for their ethical behavior apart from fear and utility, which can be easily dismissed as exaggerations? What kind of existential reasons advocate or necessitate an environmental ethic?

Anthropocentrism or Biocentrism? Ethics may prove to be illusory and deceptive, if what it proposes and demands is contrary to what really exists. This seems to be the case with regard to anthropocentrism compared to bio-centrism. An environmental ethic that would demand from the human being to regard itself as small and insignificant by comparison with the rest of nature would be not only unbiblical but also unrealistic and ontologically false. The very definition of being human involves the claim—in biblical terms, the vocation—to become or be God. In other words, it is to regard humanity as the crown and prince of creation, as someone called to and tending to have dominion over creation. There can be no environmental ethic doing justice to the human being, if it curtails and eliminates this tendency. And it is beyond any question that such an ethic would stand no chance to be applied. The human being will always want to transcend its boundaries and go beyond the world given to it. This is what freedom is about as an ontological and not as a merely moral concept; it is what distinguishes human beings from animals. The question of the proper relationship of the human being to nonhuman life in the universe is of paramount significance for environmental ethics. It would be totally misleading to denounce anthropocentrism by forbidding all human intervention into nature on the ground of respect for the sanctity of life. Human intervention in nature is not in itself evil. On the contrary, it is often benevolent for nature itself. This is further proof of the superiority of the human being compared with other forms of life in creation. Man is privileged with the freedom to intervene in nature and at the same time to allow nature to develop in a healthy manner. This is true both in the case of nonhuman nature and of human nature itself. Science and technology, therefore, are not to be condemned for all their interventions in nature, but only for those interventions affecting the fundamental relations that make up existence. Existence is relational. This means that all that may be said to exist is a combination of unity with otherness, of communion with

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diversity. In the natural world this is realized in the form of species. There is no single species without some form of direct or indirect relationship with the rest of the species. The human being itself depends for its existence on such a relationship. It is the merit of the idea of evolution that it succeeded in rendering this truth quite evident. Anthropocentrism is not the same as anthropomonism. It is only when the former falls into the state of the latter that it becomes evil. Humans are central but not independent in creation; indeed, they are themselves one among many species. The ecological crisis is a result not of anthropocentrist but of anthropomonistic tendencies in human attitudes and behavior. An environmental ethic is obliged to take this distinction into account. Human interventions in nature—including the human body itself, for there is rapidly developing through biotechnology an ecological crisis with regard to the human being itself—must be purified from all tendencies to treat certain species as unnecessary for humanity itself or to abolish the boundaries between species. Anthropomonistic tendencies are to be condemned not simply for moral but for ontological reasons. After all, the human being itself will cease to exist, if such tendencies prevail. This may be why there is already talk of a meta-anthropic era as an emerging possibility.

Social Ethics as Environmental Ethics If we root environmental ethics in existence rather than in morality itself—that is to say, in moral rules possessing an intrinsic value in themselves—then it will emerge as obvious that there is an inevitable interaction between human relationship with nature and the way human beings relate to one another. It was not by accident that classical Greek thought linked so closely together universal and social behavior by using the same word for both, namely cosmos. It is also equally significant that in the Bible, particularly in the prophetic tradition, natural catastrophes are regarded as consequences of the transgression of justice in human relations. By being relational human existence involves interdependence and interaction simultaneously among human beings themselves and with the nature they commonly share. The consequences of this truth for environmental ethics are very important. Any disturbance of humanity’s relationship with

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nature automatically affects all human beings regardless of their social status. It is an illusion, albeit widespread in our day, that by exploiting the environment, the rich gain the benefits and the poor suffer injustice. The truth is that both of rich and poor are affected negatively—for instance, in terms of health—even if the rich tend to profit economically at the expense of the poor. Similarly, the lack of justice in social relations and the increase of poverty in certain parts of the world lead to an increase in exploitation of natural resources on the part of the poorer as a means of survival or as an attempt to achieve higher economic standards enjoyed by the rich. The environmental crisis reveals the close connection between social and ecological ethics as well as the need to include the one in the other.

The Ethics of Creativity The human being is distinguished from the rest of creation not so much because it possesses reason, as if the other creatures were somehow “irrational.” The difference between humans and animals with regard to rationality is purely one of degree, not of kind, as Darwin has convincingly demonstrated. Instead, the main specific characteristic of the human being consists in the ability to take in his or her hands the existing world and create out of it a new world, bearing the seal of its human creator. Certain Church Fathers, such as St. Photius the Great, saw in creativity the essence of the imago Dei—that is to say, the biblical idea that God created the human being in His image and likeness. Other Fathers, such as St. Gregory of Nyssa, placed the imago Dei in freedom, while Church writers such as St. John of Damascus discerned it in rationality understood as freedom. All of these views ultimately amount to the same thing: that human beings alone in all material and animal creation display the tendency to create a new world out of the given one. Not simply to manufacture or produce, but to create! Animals also produce, but they do not create. Art in the sense of the emergence of a new entity, bearing the personal seal of its creator and marked by personal uniqueness, is the characteristic par excellence of humanity. This ability of the human being to treat nature in a sense as “raw material” for a new creation is, nevertheless, a double-edged

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sword that accounts to a great extent both for culture and for the ecological crisis. The human being can use nature both in order to produce and in order to create, but in the case of producing nature is treated as matter; it is reduced to the state of a thing, of useless and formless material, into substance and mere elements. In the case of creating, nature is approached as a source of inspiration and is freed from its limitations in order to become in a sense a participant in human existence itself, by acquiring so to say a personal identity and becoming part of an “I-Thou” rather than an “I-It” relationship, to adopt the language of Martin Buber. If this distinction is brought to bear on the subject of environmental ethics, the implications will be significant. It is clear that at the root of the ecological crisis lies the human use of nature as material for production. This is legitimate inasmuch as nature also offers itself for that purpose. But the tragedy is that today humans see in nature nothing more or other than material for production, forgetting that nature exists also in order to offer material for creativity. By turning nature into a means of production and consumption, the human being destroys simultaneously the beauty of nature and his own creativity. Our present culture unfortunately witnesses to this reality. An environmental ethic, then, must remind human beings of their privilege to be creators and not simply manufacturers or producers. This would make it necessary to sustain nature by treating it in a way that its use for production would not endanger its function as a means for creativity.

The Ethics of Priesthood The distinctive characteristic of the human being is to be able to regard the world not only as a sum of materials that can be analyzed and used, but also as a whole, as an integral totality. Not only religion but also physical science today poses questions about the beginning and the end of the universe, its finitude or infinitude, as if the universe were a totality, an integral whole. It is certainly the unique privilege of the human being to ask such questions, owing to what the ancient Greeks called logos—namely, the ability to gather beings into a single being, almost as if it were a living animal with a soul of its own, as Plato would suggest.

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If this characteristic of humanity is taken into consideration, humans are by definition led to the question whether this “being” called universe is self-explicable and self-existent or whether it should be referred to some entity other than itself. At this point scientists would remain silent—or perhaps indifferent—whereas religious thinkers would split into two categories: those who would regard the world as the creation of a transcendent Creator, and those who would see the world as possessing the explanation of its existence within itself. It is the first category to which the Judeo-Christian religion tradition belongs, and it is mainly on the basis of this tradition that this particular chapter is written. It may, however, have to offer something to other perspectives as well. As we have already seen, there is much talk about the human being as a “steward” of creation, by which it is meant that humans are not “lords” and possessors of creation but only guardians and managers of it. However, this imagery cannot explain satisfactorily the active role that the human being is called to play in creation, through the benevolent interventions to which we referred previously. It avoids also and even obscures the fact that humans are themselves an integral part of nature. We need, therefore, a concept that would express both of these things at once. Such a concept, at least for the Judeo-Christian tradition, is that of humanity as the priest of creation. Priesthood is a notion loaded with ideas of sacramentalism and not always easily acceptable beyond a certain part of Christianity. The true meaning of this term is to be found in the notion of offering—an act performed together with and at the same time on behalf of a community. If this is applied to the human being in its relation to nature, it means that the mission of humanity in creation is to gather it into one whole and refer it back to its Creator, both as thanksgiving (eucharistia) and as communion (koinonia) with the Creator. This is done while the human being itself remains an integral part of creation and at the same time distinct from it, as the only being endowed with the capacity to unite the world in a single reality. If this image is followed to its implications concerning the environment, it will denote that we need to ground ethics in what we may describe as a liturgical ethos, to which we have alluded earlier. If we recall what we said about ethos, nature offers itself not

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only for production, not only for creativity, but also for symbolism, which as we noted is so essential to the function of such an ecological ethos. In our rationalistic world we have lost the reality of symbol; we have, in fact, transferred it to the level of psychology which makes full use of it, yet with no reference to our relationship with nature. And yet the entire creation is for the human being full of symbols. It is a “cosmic liturgy,” to recall the phrase of St. Maximus the Confessor. Is it not a pity that modern Western man has ceased to see and treat nature as a source of symbol, giving form and expression to this ethos? This is a loss which has something to do with the inability of humanity to establish and experience a proper relationship with nature.

Toward an Eschatological Ethic Nature is not a static entity, and humanity’s relation to it is not static either. We cannot develop an environmental ethic without taking into account the future. According to the Greek Church Fathers, notably St. Maximus the Confessor, man’s place in nature is integrally tied up with a purpose, which is to bring creation its communion with God and make it share in the divinization (theosis) of man himself. Creation needs the human being just as much as the human being needs creation. The prevailing argument among ecologists that nature can do without the human being since it has in fact existed without it for a long time, overlooks the eschatological character of the world’s existence. According to the Church Fathers—but also according to those among the physical scientists who subscribe to the “anthropic cosmological principle”—everything in nature points to the arrival of the human being, whose existence gives meaning to the universe. This is so because there is a teleology that is built into creation, a forward-looking orientation which is immediately related to the human presence. Such a forward-looking ontology cannot but have important consequences for environmental ethics. Thus, it is imperative for the human beings to ask whether their behavior and actions contribute to the fulfillment of nature’s destiny or constitute a hindrance to it. In any case the fact that creation must have a future, and that this future has been entrusted to the human being, places on humanity an immense responsibility.

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The same responsibility applies also to the consideration of the fact that the kind of environment we hand over to the future generations of humanity is entirely the responsibility of the human being in each particular period. An environmental ethic which is eschatologically oriented cannot but stress this critical point. There seems to be a scandalous indifference concerning this matter in our societies today. And there is no doubt that this can only be attributed to the loss of the eschatological orientation in modern man.

Conclusion We may now conclude with the following three points: 1. There can be no environmental ethics without an environmental ethos. Teaching human beings to behave ecologically requires an experiential framework, which is provided by culture shaping people’s attitudes to life before they come to a conscious grasp of what is right and what is wrong. People relate to their environment and form their attitudes to the world long before they acquire an ethical conscience. It is on this soil that environmental ethics can grow and bear fruit. 2. Ethos requires culture, and culture presupposes a worldview shared by the community. Individualism cannot be reconciled either with culture or else with environmental ethos. It is necessary to recover the experience of community if we wish to obtain an efficient environmental ethos. 3. The ecological crisis we are confronted with does not stem only from human greed or a wrong hierarchy of values. It has to do also with the fact that human beings have lost their natural contact with their environment, their sense of belonging to nature, their sacramental approach to nature which would enable them to celebrate and incorporate nature into their relationship with God and with one another. This “liturgical” attitude to nature is essential for an environmental ethics. If these observations are accepted, the question that automatically follows is whether it is at all possible in the existing culture, shaped

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as it is by Western values, to work out an environmental ethic of the kind described earlier. We live in a world in which man is alienated more and more from both community and nature. Contemporary Western man understands only the language of values and has lost almost all organic contact with nature. People grow up without having touched or even seen a lamb or a donkey; so why would they feel any organic relationship with these animals? It would seem, therefore, inevitable to use in ethics the conceptual framework of values, if we are to work out an environmental ethic for Western man. What we should aim at may be a translation of ethos into values so that our Western mind can grasp in its own terms what it means to relate to nature in the right way. But the application of such values in actual life will always remain problematic without a deeper and broader transformation of culture in the direction of a closer and more organic relationship of humanity with nature. The ecological problem has always been and will always be in the final analysis a matter of culture rather than ethics. This does not mean that ethics should be neglected or left to wait until the proper culture emerges. It does mean, however, that ethics has its limitations and that only by drawing from culture can it bear fruit in actual life. Universal ethical values—such as respect for the sanctity of life, humility, justice, asceticism, and so on—cannot be applied outside a particular cultural context. For example, one cannot have asceticism in an individualistic culture; but at the same time, one cannot wait until our culture denounces or eliminates individualism in order to develop an environmental ethic. We have to preach these universal values even if we know that the present cultural conditions hinder their application. In this sense we can propose an environmental ethic in the form of universal ethical values, but at the same time we must pinpoint the cultural problems that make such values difficult to apply. In other words, we must call for cultural transformations, for cultural repentance. In conclusion, what I have tried to underline in this chapter is the need to work out an environmental ethic that would be based on an environmental ethos. This is not an easy task but I trust that readers will possess enough wisdom to contribute to the fulfillment of this task in a satisfactory way.



V

Scientific and Spiritual Dimensions



12 Religion and Science A Theological Approach

The ecological crisis facing humanity in our time cannot be overcome unless all human beings, in every walk of life, join forces in an effort and hope to find a solution to it. This is particularly true concerning religion and science. Today science garners much prestige and respect in our culture. Many people look on it as a power that can cure almost every evil in life. In fact, scientists speak and are listened to with immense authority, precisely because science has managed to claim for itself exceptional access to truth along with the unique capacity to produce practical results. Religion, on the contrary, certainly in Western societies, has for a long time been deprived of the authority and stature that it enjoyed in the past. It is only in certain circles of our society that a religious truth or doctrine would enjoy more authority and distinction than a scientific pronouncement, and this again not without a considerable degree of hesitancy on the part of the believer. What then is the “use” or “role” of religion in tackling such problems as the protection of the environment? Why not leave such matters to the scientists alone? Furthermore, how can science and religion work in common on such matters, given the fact that the former possesses the factual “know how,” while the latter seems to dwell in celestial places, seemingly detached from the practical realities of life? Is it only by way of complementarity that religion and science can cooperate on environmental issues—the one by

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contributing inspiration, while the other by providing knowledge? Or is there a deeper and organic relationship between the two that could justify their cooperation on such vital issues? In the course of this chapter, I propose to touch upon, albeit briefly given the limited time at my disposal, the following points: (a) Why is there such a dichotomy between religion and science in our minds? Historically, this does not seem to have been always the case. The reasons for this dichotomy have to be identified as well as their effect on the ecological crisis itself. For I believe that the ecological crisis owes a great deal to this dichotomy. (b) Can this dichotomy between science and religion continue in the face of our environmental crisis? There are many signs today coming primarily from science itself that neither science can be true science without religion, nor can religion be true to itself without science. We shall refer to these briefly, but we shall concentrate on the environment as a challenge to science and religion in order to discover their inner and deeper interrelationship. We shall make the point that neither science can respond to the challenge of the environmental crisis without religion nor can religion do that without science. Indeed, this not only for practical but also for theoretical reasons pertaining to the very nature of religion and science. Finally, (c) On what grounds and with what presuppositions can religion and science cooperate in facing the ecological challenge? What steps can be taken in order to make this cooperation feasible? We should not, of course, overlook the diversity of the various religions but we must take into account the common elements that bring these religions together in meeting the challenge of the ecological crisis in cooperation with science.

The Dichotomy between Religion and Science It may be argued that science, at least in its modern form, had its origins in religion, particularly in Christian theology. The founders

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of modern science include such names as Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton who were at the same time theologians. Already in classical Greece the search for the “reason” (logos) of nature by the PreSocratic philosophers and later by Plato as well as Aristotle was in the words of the famous classicist Werner Jaeger a “theology.” In the Jewish tradition, particularly in the later period of the Old Testament when Judaism came into creative contact with Hellenistic thought, nature was looked upon by the believer as endowed with rationality: “You have set all things in order by measure and number and weight,” we read in the book of Wisdom. To believe in God would automatically mean to recognize that there is a rationality in creation itself which the human mind could, or perhaps should, explore. Modern science was born in the thirteenth century when two basic theological doctrines were crystallized and projected by Christian medieval theologians: namely, that creation is rational, and that it is at the same time contingent. The belief in rationality led science to the search for causes and explanations that would account for the way things are in nature. There is massive evidence collected among others by the French physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem and supplemented by the American physicist and theologian Stanley Jaki in our time, showing that modern science was born from medieval theology in the thirteenth century when two theological doctrines were crystallized and projected by Christian medieval theologians, namely that creation is rational and that it is at the same time contingent. The faith that creation is contingent—that is to say, not an extension of God’s nature, but different from it and possessing its own laws— meant that in order to know nature it is necessary to study nature as it actually is. In this way, on the basis of a combination of these two beliefs, modern science was able to embark on the investigation of the way nature is and operates (on account of its contingency) with the help of concepts and ideas, such as measure, size, quality and cause, borrowed from philosophy (on account of its rationality). Science, therefore, seems to be historically a child of theology. The fact that few of us would be conscious of that today shows that a dramatic change has taken place over the course of history. The child grew up and revolted against its mother; science and religion parted ways. In this parting of ways, tradition represents the Church as the oppressor of scientific research. In condemning Galileo, the archetypal

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modern scientist, for his Copernicanism, the Church is said to have opened the way to the dichotomy between religion and science. However, the causes of this dichotomy are far deeper and more complex, having to do with profound transformations in Western thought. I would suggest that these significant transformations are also closely related to the question of the environment. Former Archbishop of York, the late John Habgood (1927– 2019), a theologian and scientist, broadens the perspective of the Galileo incident by referring to a book by an Italian historian who investigated the archives of the Office of the Inquisition and concluded that Galileo was not in fact condemned for his Copernican views but “for his atomism and for the kind of reductionism that goes with it.” This, as the Archbishop demonstrates, contributed to science some of its current characteristics, notably self-sufficiency, self-justification on the basic of results (“We do it because it works”), limiting the field of interest (specialization) from which autonomy of the different disciplines arises and which leads to fragmentation of knowledge. In other words the authority and self-sufficiency that science acquired vis-à-vis religion was due not so much to a conflict between scientific freedom and ecclesiastic oppression or theological dogmatism, but to the growing spirit of atomistic and mechanistic approach to nature which characterized Western thought and mentality in the Middle Ages and ever since. It is the mentality that lends authority to science in our societies: by producing results through the specialization and fragmentation of knowledge with which it operates, science becomes “useful” to a humanity looking desperately for happiness. Habgood therefore concludes that the authority and selfsufficiency that science acquired vis-à-vis religion were due not so much to a conflict between scientific freedom and religious oppression or theological dogmatism but to the growing spirit of an atomistic and mechanistic approach to nature which has characterized Western thought and mentality since the Middle Ages. Descartes confirms this analysis in words that reveal at the same time the serious effects that the self-sufficiency of science has had with regard to the natural environment. Thus, as we have previously cited, he wrote in his Discours de la Méthode: One could find a technique by which the powers and energy, of fire, water, air, the stars the skies and all the other bodies that

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surround us, exactly as we know the techniques of our craftsmen, could be applied in the same way to all proper uses so that we might become masters and possessors (maîtres et possesseurs) of nature. Science has fulfilled Descartes’s dream with great success, thanks to its mechanistic approach to nature, as well as its specialization and its independence from religion, acquiring in this way great prestige and immense authority in a world pursuing happiness. Through its achievement human beings—all of us!—have indeed become “masters and possessors of nature.” But is this not precisely the root and cause of our ecological crisis? Nonetheless, religion has its own share in responsibility. Impelled by science to the realm of mythology, while striving to gain recognition and authority in a world seeking happiness, religion in the West entered into competition with science in an attempt to satisfy the growing demands in the market of happiness. It too encouraged human beings to become “masters and possessors of nature” in the name of either the Bible, which was perceived as presenting God as ordering man to “dominate the earth” or of a spirituality which exalts human rationality as the divine image in man over and against the debased and sinful materiality of the rest of creation. Religion and science may well have opposed each other in many ways, but they also appear to have collaborated closely, albeit unconsciously, for the destruction of God’s creation.

The Environment: A Challenge to Both Religion and Science In our days, things are changing rapidly in both science and religion, and this is bound to affect the role they will play in the ecological crisis. First of all, the entire philosophy of specialized knowledge is being questioned in both science and theology, particularly in the former. For example, it is becoming increasingly clear to scientists that zoology and botany are not as clearly distinct disciplines as they were traditionally thought to be: one cannot understand the bee

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without studying the flowers that determine its life, its whole being, and its nature. This environmental interaction and interdependence can be extended ad infinitum: everything depends on everything else. This new “holistic” approach to knowledge can have important environmental implications for both science and religion. The extinction of a certain species affects the rest of the species. The human being itself is decisively affected by every change in the natural environment. If science moves consistently from the traditional fragmentation of knowledge toward a holistic approach, then religion—and Christian theology in particular— must revise its views about the human being and admit that humans are inconceivable without their organic relationship with the rest of creation. Christian theology would have to accept the basic claims of the evolutionary ideas of biology, understanding man as an organic part of the family of animals. In this respect, there is no essential threat to the Christian faith in accepting the evolutionary theory in its basic principle—that is, the idea that the human being represents the last point in a biological process—although there is also no need to accept Darwinism in its detailed description of this evolution. The Bible itself speaks of the creation of man on the last day and out of natural elements already in existence. Such an holistic approach would exercise a beneficial influence on people’s attitudes to the environment, but this can be effective only if science and religion coincide in their views about the world and the place of the human being in it. The environment can then serve as a catalyst in restoring the organic relationship between science and religion. Second, it is becoming clearer to both science and theology that not only is man dependent on the rest of creation for his existence, but that the reverse is equally true. The rest of creation, too, depends on the human being for the realization and the fulfillment of its existence. Environmentalists thus need to revise the common assumption that man needs the rest of creation, whereas the rest of creation does not need man. Religious thought—and certainly Christian theology—is anthropocentric in its cosmology and would insist that the human being is indispensable to creation. There are signs today that science is moving in the same direction, as witnessed in the development of the “anthropic principle,” which states that

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the universe is made up in such a way as to make sense only if the human being is presupposed. True humanity requires an organic link with the rest of creation; but the latter also needs humanity in order to fulfill itself. If the “anthropic principle” is accepted by scientists—and there is evidence that the discussion it has provoked is moving in this direction—then a healthy and creative rapprochement could take place between religion and science with significant implications for our ecological thinking. Third, it is noteworthy that ever since the quantum theory won the day in science it has become difficult to eliminate the human being from the process of scientific “truth.” The observer, we are now told, affects reality in the process of the experiment. What is then left of the traditional subject/object dichotomy? If there is no such thing as a pure “object” in science, then it is no longer possible to operate in scientific research without involving the human person. This notion of person—usually regarded as a subject pertaining to sociology, psychology, and theology—is now becoming crucial for science too. Science must open its borders to meet with theology and the human sciences, if it is to understand correctly even its own nature. Fourth, it is of crucial importance to understand the significance of culture for science. In spite of its tendency to dominate the entire human community, there can be no doubt that Western science is influenced by, if not dependent upon, Western culture in a decisive way. What would science look like if other cultures were to influence it? Is an African or an Asian science not a conceivable thing? In such a case religion would surely play a decisive role. Finally, we should note the appearance in our time of a certain hostility toward science because of growing concern for the environment. A theologian of my own Church, the late Philip Sherrard, could be an example of such an anti-scientific attitude because of environmental concern. “New age” currents and all sorts of semireligious movements are today promoting an ecological way of thinking and discourse which excludes rationalism and, by implication, science itself. Where should we stand on this matter? It is my conviction that the environment can be protected in a healthy way only if religion and science open up their boundaries to one other in order to meet each other in a creative way. It is only by overcoming the traditional dichotomy between these two

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disciplines that we can work successfully for the protection of the environment.

Toward a Creative Cooperation of Science with Religion As a theologian, then, I should like to propose the following ways whereby one might conceive a cooperation of religion and science for the purpose of protecting the natural environment.

1.  The Way of Ethics (and Action) Religion is recognized as a moral force, as having something fundamental to say about the way people should behave. This is particularly true of religious thought in Western Christianity. We are all familiar with the pronouncements of the Popes on moral issues as well as of the interventions of the Protestant churches and the World Council of Churches on social and political issues. Consequently, it is becoming customary to seek the view of the Church on how the scientific advances of our time could be controlled in such a way that humanity may be protected from the terrifying consequences of so many of the achievements of science. In a period of rapid rise and expansion of bioethics, is it not also time for the systematic development of a discipline of ecological or environmental ethics to be given shape and content by theologians and scientists working together? The creation of an international institute of eco-ethics would be a challenge of historic magnitude for both the religious and scientific leaders of the world. It would in fact bring together representatives of religious and scientific communities with the responsibility and mandate of advising the world’s political leaders on environmental ethical questions and of working out a code of environmental ethics which would eventually be invested with the power of international law. Here is a challenge of historic magnitude before the religious and scientific leaders of the world. We have left it to the politicians to deal with the ecological crisis. We must realize that politics cannot be effective without moral support. And moral support cannot come from science alone or from religion alone; it can only be the result of the cooperation of these two.

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2.  The Way of Motivation (or Inspiration) Environmental awareness and behavior is not simply a matter of ethics; they also require motivation. Religion can undoubtedly provide the necessary motivation for ethical behavior, but science is not necessarily a source of ethical conduct. Surely, however, the promotion of knowledge is not the only motive in scientific work. If it is true to itself, science never believes that its findings are final and its conclusions infallible. The scientist like the theologian seeks the truth by assuming and believing that there is always more to be discovered beyond the actual findings of the laboratory. The world we live in and try to understand remains always a mystery. The scientist can hardly perform his or her scientific work properly without realizing that the particular knowledge that emerges from it reveals only a tiny part of the world’s reality. This creates in the scientist’s consciousness a feeling not only of humility but also of responsibility for those bits of reality he or she does not (yet) know. The motivation of the scientist and that of the theologian converge at the point of understanding the world as an indissoluble and indivisible organic unity, whose integrity has to be assumed and respected in order for any particular aspect or fragment of its knowledge to be true. Thus, both religion and science, if they wish to be true to themselves, accept the fact that every revelation of reality, whether religious or scientific, can only make sense if the world is respected in its mysterious integrity and wholeness. If a certain fragmented knowledge advances the welfare of a certain part of creation (e.g., the human being) at the expense of other parts of the world, this in terms of religion offends God the Creator and in terms of science falsifies the knowledge obtained through research. Religious motivation and scientific motivation lead to the same respect for the integrity of creation.

3.  The Conceptual Way (or Common Language) For centuries scientists and theologians have been using their own separate, exclusive, and esoteric languages. This has in turn rendered it difficult, if not impossible, for an environmental or ecological language to emerge or develop that would involve theologians and

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scientists at the same time. Technical terminology may have to remain for internal use on both sides; but when it comes to the environment, surely a common language must be found. For such a common language to be generated it will be necessary to work out a conceptual framework shared both religion and science. We must therefore arrive at a cosmology common to both scientists and theologians; indeed, we must also fundamentally agree on what constitutes knowledge and truth. Such agreement will also be necessary on method as well as on content. We must stop taking it for granted that theology and religion are about “spiritual” and “metaphysical” realities, while technology and science are about “material” and “down to earth” matters. The natural environment is at once a spiritual and a material reality because it involves human beings possessing freedom and capable of love and hatred, as well as a world which is mysterious enough to demand reverence, respect and love.

Conclusion Science and religion need to forget their traditional opposition or indifference toward one other and aspire to cooperation at the deepest level in order to protect man’s natural environment from the dangers confronting it today. Recent developments in both disciplines not only facilitate but in fact demand such a cooperation. There is no doubt that religion and science are, each in its own way, responsible for the ecological crisis we are facing. It is, therefore, the duty of both to undo the harm they have caused, and it is only by working together that they can achieve this. In this chapter I could not but limit myself to certain guiding principles concerning this moment in history when God’s creation needs man’s protection before it is too late. This symposium will, I hope, spell out in practical details how science and religion can work together to save one of the most beautiful parts of God’s creation—in this case, the Black Sea.1 This is a part of the world

This chapter is based on the keynote address by Metropolitan John at the Second Ecological Symposium organized under the joint auspices of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Jacques Santer, president of the European Commission, on the Black Sea in September 1997. 1

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where religion has unequivocally shaped civilization and where human sin, indifference, and ignorance have undoubtedly done everything to bring it to the point of destruction. We are all looking forward to a closer acquaintance with this historic and beautiful area as well as to hearing about ways to protect and save it.

13 Humanity and Nature Learning from the Indigenous

Introduction This symposium is taking place on the Amazon River, in a geographic area marked with extraordinary beauty of the natural environment—a beauty, however, which is threatened more and more by the activity of “civilized” humanity.1 We are, therefore, here not simply in order to admire and enjoy but also to lament. We are here to reflect together on the causes of the environmental crisis as it is manifested in this particular part of the world, and to ask ourselves the disturbing question why it is that the indigenous people have managed to protect the natural environment better than we civilized Christians have been able to do. Several answers to this question could be proffered. The one that comes first to our minds is the ethical one: it is human greed and the desire for economic development that has led to the exploitation of nature in such a devastating way. This is undoubtedly true. Yet behind this there lies a deeper reason. It is the fact that in our Western culture a crisis has occurred between the human being and nature.

This chapter was originally presented as a keynote address during the Sixth Ecological Symposium organized jointly by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and the Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan on the Amazon River in July 2006. 1

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We no longer understand ourselves as part or parts of nature. This seems to be our fundamental difference from the indigenous people of this land as well as of other lands. We are here, therefore, to learn from those whom we have tried to convert to our way of thinking. The ecological crisis cannot be overcome unless we are ready to question some of our fundamental philosophical principles by taking into account what other cultures can teach us from their traditional wisdom. In this chapter I shall focus on two points. The first is self-critical: How have we arrived at the alienation of the human being from nature and, consequently, at the present crisis in the relationship between these two? The second point relates more directly to the place where our symposium is being held: What can we learn from cultures different from our own in order to restore our broken relationship with nature? Our Western culture has been shaped under influences from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. We cannot free ourselves from this, neither should we convert to paganism in order to save the environment. And yet many elements from non-Christian cultures can be incorporated into our Judeo-Christian tradition. The time is long gone—and we thank God for that—when Christian religion, in its missionary zeal, confronted other religions with a negative and exclusivist spirit. “Inculturation” is now the objective and methodology of Christian mission. Let us, therefore, listen respectfully to those indigenous cultures which have managed to survive the zeal of our ancestors, who conquered them almost to the point of extinction. This can apply not only to religion but to science as well, particularly to scientific method. Some reflections on this may also be useful at this point.

The Alienation of the Human Being from Nature The definition of the human being has been attempted many times in the past without any reference or correlation to the natural environment. One classic instance is found in ancient Greek philosophy, chiefly in its Platonist guise, but there have also been numerous theological approaches through the centuries that, in

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the final analysis, always bore the direct or indirect influence of Platonism. The main form assumed by this definition relied on the concept of the soul. Human identity was perceived as residing in the soul, which was thought to be existent and self-subsisting, rather than an organic part of the natural world—its essence being spiritual and not material, and its survival independent of the body’s relation to the natural world. This Platonist conception influenced Christian tradition deeply, while its implications were of momentous import to the ecological problem. The identification of the human being with his soul led to the following assumptions during the course of history: (a) The assumption that time and space, fundamental constituents of the natural world surrounding us, constitute, along with the perishable body, the prison of the soul. In order to find himself man must break free from the body, from space and time—that is, from his natural environment—and live an immaterial and atemporal existence, within an eternity that is not linked to the natural world. (b) Since the human being may be conceived without any relationship to the natural world, in the final analysis it matters not at all whether or not the natural world surrounding man will be annihilated. In fact, for many exponents of ancient Christian theology, such as Origen and Augustine, in the Kingdom of God—namely, in the ultimate destination and outcome of the world—only souls are meant to survive; the natural world, apart from the souls of human beings and the incorporeal angels, is destined to disappear. The answer to the question “What is man?” is in this case an insubstantial spirit, an immortal and eternal soul, an entity that can be conceived without need of a body or the natural environment. A similar attempt to identify and define the human being without reference to the natural environment—another a modified form of Platonist idealism centered on the soul—was undertaken, mainly in the West from the Middle Ages up to modern times, by the definition of man as a rational and intelligent being. The answer given in that case to the question “What is man?” was a rational

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animal, endowed with thought, self-awareness, and awareness of the world. This definition, which originated with Augustine and Boethius, came to its culmination with Descartes—a scientistphilosopher, a father of the Enlightenment and, to a large degree, of modern mathematics and physics—in the form of his illustrious dictum: “cogito ergo sum.” The consequences of this had a crucial impact on ecology. Thus: (a) Human beings developed their intellectual capabilities unilaterally and independently of the body. The development of mathematics as an instrument producing pure “intelligence” led headlong to the emergence of “intelligent beings” that have no need for the human body in order to produce rational thought. The only issue now was whether any residual emotions or appetites remain in the being that we call man (in the form of a weak intelligence) or whether even these have been sacrificed (in the form of a strong intelligence) on the altar of pure—that is to say, incorporeal—intelligence. Whatever the case, the important and salient point from an ecological perspective is that intelligence was wrested away from the human body so radically as to abrogate it and render it useless. This is the problem with computers and the internet, and it sharply calls to question the innocence of any neutrality with which we usually regard these technological achievements. The great and awful risk attendant on these attainments is that the body is gradually eliminated or canceled as an instrument of intelligence, given that we think, communicate, market, and even fall in love without the body—that unique instrument that connects us with our natural environment and with other people. As a consequence, the body is more and more incapable of following the amount of information provided by intelligence. (b) The human being developed its intellectual capabilities to the detriment of its natural environment. This came about as the consequence of two factors: The first is that man realized the power enclosed in intelligence. It is not accidental that the same mind that declared “Cogito ergo sum,” namely Descartes, would as early as the seventeenth

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century, produce the following passage in Discours de la Méthode: [With the advancement of science] we can reach knowledge that would be very useful in life and could find a practical method, whereby the force and energies inherent in fire, water, air, the stars, celestial and all other bodies that surround us [= the natural environment] might be used in the same manner in all suitable applications, and so we may become masters and possessors of nature [maîtres et possesseurs de la nature]. The ecological burden in this pronouncement by Descartes is found in the last few words: “masters and possessors of nature,” precisely by dint of cogito ergo sum, which represents the power of knowledge. Therefore, at about the same time, Francis Bacon addresses the human being in even blunter terms: “I bring you nature and all its progeny that you may bind it to your service and render it as your slave.” Is any more clear proof necessary then as to wherein lies the root of our ecological crisis? It lies in the elevation of intellectual capability to the point of its becoming the single, overwhelming determinant of human identity. Assuredly, a critique of this view readily springs to mind: Might it not be the dominion of intelligence but rather its misuse that is at fault here? The same applies to the internet: Might the problem actually lie in its misuse? If this is so then the burden falls on ethics. In other words, the problem is not that we glorify our intelligence to the detriment of the natural world, but that we misuse it. The solution of the ecological problem is thereby to be found in the domain of ethics. Nevertheless, an ethic deprived of an ontological basis—that is, lacking a foundation in truth—is unacceptable from a theological and philosophical perspective. Thus the matter is not whether man acts rightly or wrongly (= ethics), but whether he acts in harmony with the truth of his being, of his identity. The issue is directly related to the dialogue between science, philosophy, and theology. It is very easy indeed—and that is what usually happens—for scientific truth and theological truth not to coincide and for us to remain unconcerned whether they do coincide or not. The scientist has his or her own “scientific” truth in the knowledge of nature, while the theologian possesses the “spiritual”

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truth that springs from faith. Yet if this is so, where can the scientist meet the theologian? Not of course on the point of truth, since two disparate truths are involved. Their meeting point then is usually found in the domain of ethics: both can agree whether something is good or bad, permissible or not, and so on—the criteria for that agreement lying in the moral values and rules accepted by both sides. Let us regard the issue particularly with respect to the problem of humanity and its natural environment. Scientists and theologians alike recognize that the natural environment is harmed by the dominion of human intelligence over material nature. If we desired to resolve the problem with the help of ethics, we would say: it is not the dominion of intelligence in itself that is harmful, but the fact that it is ill-used or misused. Yet, if we delve more deeply into the subject, to the marrow of truth, then scientists and theologians will ask together: Could it be that the ascendancy of intelligence in opposition to man’s physical and the environment’s natural substance impinges on the truth of what man is? Surely we cannot let the theologian and the scientist each hold their own views on this matter. The truth about what man is must be common to science and theology. We cannot play with two truths: a truth of knowledge and a truth of faith. The scientist who is faithful to his prayer book, but indifferent as to whether what he observes in his laboratory is compatible with the tenets of his faith, has already undergone a divisive rift and, in any case, has rendered the dialogue between science and theology almost impossible. Thus, within any real dialogue between science and theology, the issue of humanity’s relationship with the natural environment must be focused on the question: What relationship of the human being with his natural environment is attuned to the truth of his identity? The answer to this question must achieve as great a convergence as possible between science and theology. Any deviation must be put to the proof and not be ascribed offhand to an incompatibility of underlying assumptions. This is the only way for a common stance of theology and science before the environmental crisis to have a solid ontological—and not merely an ethical—foundation. Now, the crucial question in any discussion of humanity’s relationship to nature is whether the body is essential to the definition and identity of the human being. More specifically, the question is whether the human being has a body or is a body. If the

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answer lies in the latter, then the body is an element of the truth of one’s human being, of one’s identity. However, if this is so, then in the truth of his being, man is inextricably bound to his natural environment. For how can one possibly conceive of the human body without the rest of material creation? Those who believe that ultimately the human body will resurrect, but that the material world will not survive, certainly have a mythical, unreal body in mind. St. Methodius of Olympus in the fourth century AD maintained, in response to Origen of Alexandria, that it cannot be possible for God to resurrect bodies unless He also saves material creation in its entirety. As we shall see this point is directly connected with the ecological problem. Any scientific and technological attainment that, in respect of knowledge, abrogates or weakens the role of the body, contravenes not just ethics, but the very truth or ontology of man. It is precisely because of this indissoluble and ontological relationship of man with his body, and through it with his natural environment, that the Church Fathers describe man as a “microcosm,” which contains the “macrocosm” and connects by means of his body the material to the intelligible world. It is not accidental that, in order to save man, the Son and Logos of God, assumed “flesh”—that is, took upon Himself the very element of man that links him to his natural environment. If the truth of man were to be found in his soul, then the divine Word would only assume a human soul. However, by taking a human body, He demonstrated that man is inconceivable without his body and that He did not come only to save man but all of creation. There can be no greater proof of the importance of the natural environment than this doctrinal truth. These considerations prove man’s organic link with—one might call it dependency on—his physical environment. The fact that man does not “have” a body but “is” a body denotes that without his natural environment man himself ceases to be. In other words, the truth of man is inextricably bound with all of material creation. This truth is founded on the fact that man was created by God at the end of creation and only once the creation of the material world and all the animal kingdom had preceded him. It is typical that in Gnostic systems man always appears before the material and animal kingdoms are created. Whereas in Holy Scripture, the reverse is the case. This declares man’s dependence on all of the

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preceding creation and especially on the animal kingdom. From this point of view, the theory of evolution presents no problems for theology. On the contrary, it is welcome insofar as it proves that man is indivisibly bound with the rest of material creation.

Restoring the Relationship of Humanity with Nature One of the characteristics which makes up the identity of the indigenous, as described by the World Bank in 1991, is “close attachment to ancestral territories and to the natural resources in these areas.” What Western culture has lost for reasons which we have just indicated, the indigenous people have preserved— namely, a close relationship with nature. There is no sense with them of superiority, let alone domination of the human being over natural world, as we find it in our Western culture; Bacon’s and Descartes’s arrogance, which calls the human being to be “master and possessor” of nature, is totally absent. As a consequence, there is no ecological crisis in the culture of the indigenous peoples. How was this achieved? What sort of worldview made this possible? The thing that has struck those who have studied indigenous cultures is the central role that mythology plays in the lives of tribal people. These mythical narratives foster a strong and creative relationship between the indigenous people and their natural environment. They help them develop a more holistic approach to nature and, of course, a sense of deep reverence for it. Myth has been almost anathematized in our Western culture. It has been regarded as unworthy and undignified of rational beings, who are supposed to think only in terms of history—that is, of events that the human mind can grasp, prove, and control. Art and literature, which cannot but operate with myth, are attributed to the imagination—that is, to something we are not supposed to take as true and real. The most unfortunate result of this loss has been a split between time and space, as well as a division within time. Time in our culture is fragmented into past, present, and future in order to be measured and thus comprehended or controlled by the human mind. Only what falls within this measurable and rationally controllable time

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is real and hence credible. Myth, on the other hand, transcends this fragmented time and redeems it. The tribal peoples can live in common union with their ancestors and be at peace with that experience. Myth unites past, present, and future into one reality and truth. What the Western people find in art and literature as liberating and redeeming forces in their lives the indigenous people experience as an ordinary reality. However, myth does not only unite fragmented time; it also unites time with space. All myths borrow their material from space; they liberate space from the bondage of fragmented time making it look eternal, filled with some kind of extra-temporal “divine” presence. In this regard, space and time are inseparably related to each other thanks to myth. Now our Western culture has divorced myth from reality to such an extent that the consequences for the human attitude to nature are becoming serious. Nature is treated either as real or as imaginative. Science is assigned to the former, art and literature to the latter, while the two always remain clearly apart. Religion is caught up somewhere in between the two—rejected by science when it leans toward myth, and despised by art when it claims to have reason on its side. If art and science could interpenetrate with the help of myth, the natural environment would benefit enormously. This leads us to say a few words about scientific method. There seem to be two possible attitudes of the human being toward nature in the scientific sphere. One is to treat nature, in the spirit of Bacon and Descartes, as an object to be possessed and grasped, conceived and analyzed. This is what Western science seems to aspire to. With the emergence of technology this has reached an extreme form. As Heidegger, who has so deeply penetrated into this subject, has put it, technology differs from previous attitudes to nature in that thanks to it the human being for the first time in history abstracts energy from nature and stores it as “standing reserve” (in German “Bestand” according to M. Heidegger), which can be used for purposes other than those “intended” by nature itself. Chemistry, hydroelectricity, and so on are the extreme results of this scientific treatment of nature. The indigenous cultures employ an entirely different attitude to nature. Here the key words are “observation” and “relationality,” rather than “conception” and “analysis.” The scientific method consists in this case in observing how nature works, what each

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natural element, treated as a living being, does to other beings, including humanity itself. Thus, the indigenous people develop a remarkable knowledge of the pharmaceutical effects of various plants without analyzing things in their chemical components, as a Western scientist would do, but instead respecting their integrity as if they were divine. This leads to a more holistic approach to nature, something that Western scientists are only now beginning slowly to recognize and articulate. Finally, I shall mention another characteristic of indigenous cultures, which has much to do with the natural environment. I am referring to the place of ritual in these cultures. Ritual is another thing that Western culture has long treated with contempt. Even Orthodox Christians think of ritual as unworthy of educated people, avoiding to cross themselves or to attend services which, in the case of the Orthodox, are loaded with ritual and symbolism. Nevertheless, there is a profound connection between ritual and respect for nature. For all ritual acts involve nature in man’s relationship to God, while all forms of worship which eliminate ritual automatically exclude nature as well. The human being cannot reach God alone, without its natural environment. Humanity is part of nature, and therefore man is a liturgical being. A recovery of the liturgical ethos is the best way to obtain environmental consciousness and ecological sensitivity.

Conclusion I have tried to demonstrate in the limited space of this chapter the seriousness for our attitude to the environment of the dissociation of the human being from nature in Western culture and how open we should be to what indigenous cultures can teach us in this respect. As I have already emphasized, we do not have to convert to paganism in order to save the natural environment. Paganism respects nature, but it also cultivates a fear of nature. Respect and fear must be clearly distinguished from each other. Western culture has liberated humanity from the fear of nature, but it has at the same time destroyed all manner of respect for it. Therefore, we must learn from indigenous cultures to respect nature and feel that we are part of it. We must free ourselves from the only dangerous myth—namely, that the human being through its mind and reason

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can comprehend and control reality. Reality and nature itself are much broader than our human minds can ever grasp and procure. Whether or not we believe in a personal God, we must treat with respect all that escapes our reason, including nature itself. As we set foot on these traditional lands of the great Amazonian river, we all sense the damage that our Western Christian world has wrought upon the native peoples and their land. The exploitation of natural resources that is taking place is beginning to worry those who care for the environment. But perhaps we should worry still more that there is very little left of the indigenous culture from which we can learn. For the ecological crisis is above all a matter of culture, and in order to overcome the crisis we must be willing to learn from each other.

14 Man and Animals

Wolves and sheep will live together in peace, and leopards will lie down with young goats. Calves and lion cubs will feed together, and little children will take care of them. Cows and bears will eat together, and their calves and cubs will lie down in peace. Lions will eat straw as cattle do. Even a baby will not be harmed if it plays near a poisonous snake. On Zion, God’s sacred hill, there will be nothing harmful or evil. The land will be as full of knowledge of the Lord as the seas are full of water. A day is coming when the new king from the royal line of David will be a symbol to the nations. They will gather in his royal city and give him honor. (Isa. 11:6–10) These words of the Prophet Isaiah so eloquently express the vision of a world where animals and humans will live in complete harmony and reconciliation in the Kingdom of God. This vision has nourished the faith, imagination, and ethos of the Orthodox Church in all facets of its life. That is why any accusation that the Orthodox tradition abuses or belittles animals is clearly unjust and ungrounded. There are at least three aspects of the life of the Orthodox Church that bear witness to this fact: its monasticism, its worship, and its theology.

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The Monastic Way There is perhaps no more moving example—not merely of love, but mainly of respect for the animals—than what we observe in the lives of the great ascetics of Orthodox Christianity. In their lives and stories, the prophetic vision of Isaiah, as quoted above, appears as a tangible reality. In their day-to-day experience, humans and animals live together harmoniously, reciprocating love and care for one other. Indeed, whenever this balance is not achieved or ruptured, the blame is normally attributed to human beings as a sin for which they are called to repent. In a story recorded in the Spiritual Meadow about the monks of St. Gerasimus’s community, located one mile beyond the Jordan River, the author John Moschus (d. 619) eloquently and emotionally describes how a wounded lion once approached Abba Gerasimus to show him its wound, roaring on account of its pain. The elder cleaned and took care of the wound, binding it with a cloth, and then released the lion into the wild. However, the lion would not leave “so that the monk admired the profound gratitude of the beast.” So the elder “proceeded to feed the lion with bread and water.” In this way, as we continue to read, “the lion remained at the monastery for a period of years, never leaving the monk.” When the old man died, the lion had no desire for food, frantically searching for the elder until the other monks led it to his tomb, where it knocked its head on the ground desolately and roared uncontrollably, almost dying at the tomb of the elder. Similar examples and stories abound in the Lives of the Saints and other historical sources. For example, a lion digs up the earth in order for St. Mary of Egypt to be buried by Elder Zosimas. Wild beasts live peacefully alongside hermits, such as St. Kyriakos the anchorite and St. Savvas the blessed. In Russia, wild animals keep company with saints such as Sergius of Radonezh and Seraphim of Sarov. The accounts are numerous. In turn, the respect of monks for animals often reaches the degree of exaggeration. In the fourth century, St. Macarius of Alexandria immersed himself in a swamp full of mosquitoes for six months because he had accidentally killed one of them. The same attitude by ascetics toward God’s creatures is present event in our time. St. Silouan of Mount Athos (d. 1937) narrates how he once happened to step on a fly and wept for “three nights, mourning [his] cruelty

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toward creation.” Another time, he threw boiling water onto some bats and “once again shed many tears.” On yet another occasion, when he noticed a severed snake on the road, he felt a deep sadness for “the whole of creation and all that suffers,” causing him to weep “intensely before God.” Staretz Silouan concluded that “the Holy Spirit teaches the soul how to love every living being to the point that one no longer wishes to cut a single green leaf or step on any wild flower.” Are these examples romanticized or exaggerated? Perhaps. However, what else do we need in order to appreciate the utmost respect that we are called to demonstrate before animals and the whole creation?

The Liturgical Life The respect and love toward animals are nevertheless not confined to certain extreme examples or “eccentric” ascetics but actually permeate the Orthodox Church generally in its daily life as well as in the way in its daily prayer and praise. This is especially manifest in art, both literary and visual, through which the Church expresses itself in worship to God. Thus, although human beings in fact possess language and create art, animals and the natural environment are nevertheless overall not absent from iconography and liturgy. Most characteristic and striking in this regard is the service of Holy Saturday, which includes the Vespers of Resurrection. In solemnly announcing and anticipating the resurrection, the Church adopts the prayer of the three Maccabee children taken from the canticle in book of the Prophet Daniel (ch. 3, v. 1–23), whereby all created beings—both animate and inanimate, indeed including the animal kingdom and the natural environment—are invited and exhorted to glorify God and to celebrate with humanity: Let all sea beasts and everything that lives in water bless the Lord; let all birds of heaven bless the Lord. Let all animals, both wild and tame, bless the Lord and praise Him to the ages. Moreover, human beings act in worship as representatives of all creation. We are its voice and mouth, serving as the link that binds

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creation to God, while offering it a means of expressing this blessing and praise, as well as elevating all of creation with humankind to what constitutes for the Church the utmost perfection and sanctification: namely, transformation by and union with God. In this regard, the Orthodox Church does not hesitate to extend its blessing and sanctification to all the natural elements, including animals and plants. The following “prayer for farm sheep” is included in the Great Euchologion (or Book of Prayers) in the Orthodox Church: Lord and Master, our God, who has dominion over all of creation, we pray and beseech You: Just as you blessed and increased the flocks of the Patriarch Jacob, so too bless this flock of sheep . . . increasing and protecting it . . . while delivering it from every hostile attack, hint of death, and disease of plague. This inclusion of animals in the worship of the Church—always, of course, through and with human beings—also finds expression in Church art. Since the earliest days of the Church, there was never any reluctance to use animals as symbols in sacred iconography and architecture. The foremost example of this is the fish, which is even adopted to reflect and signify Christ Himself, especially in connection with the Divine Eucharist. However, beyond the fish, there are also the pigeon (related to the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan River) and the lamb (as another a central Christological symbol of sacrifice) from the early Church; indeed, the lamb is still closely associated with the sacrament of the Divine Eucharist. Deer, peacocks, as well as many other birds and creatures decorate the interior of temples, the vestments of clergy, and so forth. In the renowned sixth-century mosaics of the Basilica of Saint Apollinaire in Classe in Ravenna, the eschatological state of paradise is depicted as a meadow, where trees and flowers surround the symbol of the cross, along with sheep—all of them clearly indicating that participation in the Kingdom of God is not reserved for human beings alone but also for the entire creation and the natural environment, including animals and plants. The presence of animals is moreover apparent in icons depicting the great feasts of the Church, such as Christmas, which traditionally portray the presence and participation of animals—in the case of the icon of Christ’s Nativity, an ox and a donkey—surrounding the manger.

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Therefore, animals always accompany human beings in the most important historical events of salvation history. Christian faith, and particularly Orthodox Christianity, never isolates human beings from their natural environment.

The Theological Tradition In the age of the Church Fathers, theology was profoundly influenced by Platonism. This inevitably resulted in some ecclesiastical writers considering humans as rational beings who possess an immortal soul and thus surpass animals and the material world to the extent that the salvation of the world brought by Christ was regarded as being confined to human beings alone. However, while authors such as Origen, Evagrius of Pontus, and Augustine of Hippo follow this line of thinking, the mainstream Greek patristic thought and official position of the Eastern Church do not coincide with this position. For instance, in the fourth century, Methodius of Olympus reacts strongly to Origen’s dualistic philosophy. Furthermore, Athanasius of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, and many others speak of “deification” or “divinization” (theosis) as communion with the God of all creation, just as Byzantine iconography represents the new world—“a new heaven and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17 and Rev. 21:1)—brought by Christ into His Kingdom. In the Middle Ages but also in more recent years, both theology and philosophy in the West overstressed the intellectual faculties of human beings to the degree that they often undermined and diminished the role of animal kingdom and the material creation in general. As a result, they frequently subjected the animal and material worlds to human beings, which in turn fostered and fed the current ecological crisis. Calvinist theology contributed especially to this development by emphasizing the passage of the Old Testament of God’s command to Adam: “Be fruitful and increase; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28). In the observation of Max Weber, this contributed to the advancement of modern capitalism. The emergence of Darwin was needed to provide a critical blow to this arrogant stance of humanity over and against the animal kingdom and the rest of creation by substantiating how human beings are organically connected to and identified with animals, being separated from them—even

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with regard to conscience and reason—only in degree but not in kind. The Orthodox Church has not assumed an official position on these developments. However, if we take into account the teaching of the Greek Fathers, particularly such writers as Basil the Great and Maximus the Confessor, then the evolution of species in the creation of the world and particularly in the animal kingdom until the appearance of humankind must be taken for granted. As for the difference between humans and animals, the most important thing is not so much the intellect, which to a degree is also recognized in animals, but the freedom that only human beings possess in its ultimate, existential form, by experiencing the limitations of personal existence while expressing in diverse ways—including language, art, and tragedy—the desire to transcend these limits by seeking immortality. In this sense, and only in this sense, human beings alone possess a soul. Still, these particular characteristics of human beings do not give them any right to despise or any authority to diminish animals. On the contrary, human beings are obliged to embrace animals and all creation with affection and compassion in an effort to deliver them from the corruption and mortality that torment creation in its entirety (cf. Rom. 8:20–21).

VI

Ecumenical and Cultural Implications



15 Ecological Asceticism A Cultural Revolution

As we have endeavored to demonstrate and underline in previous chapters, the ecological problem is, at root, a spiritual issue. Many people dealing with the environmental crisis tend to overlook its spiritual aspects. Yet both historically and practically, it is impossible to address the plight of creation without reference to religion and ethics. The American historian Lynn White Jr. was clearly right to attribute the causes of the problem to Christian theology, particularly of the Western Church, which exploited the verses of Genesis containing God’s order to the first human beings to “dominate the earth” in order to encourage people, as Descartes bluntly put it, to become “masters and possessors of nature.” This attitude drew further support and inspiration from a theology that stressed the superiority of human beings because of their “rationality,” which it regarded as “God’s image” in man. Such a rationalistic approach detached human beings from the rest of creation and encouraged them to look down with contempt on whatever is not rational, spiritual, or human. Along with this line of thought, another misunderstanding arose of the human person as a thinking individual whose happiness and prosperity acquired the status of the highest good in ethics. As a result, sin became limited to whatever contradicts or prevents this aspiration. A Christian could, therefore, destroy nature with a clear and good conscience, so long as this contributed to the

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fulfillment of human happiness. Thankfully, today, human beings are beginning to realize that such an attitude toward nature actually threatens human happiness and even human existence itself. In so doing, they are not departing from the principle of promoting human happiness. Indeed, they are deeply and perhaps exclusively motivated by the same principle. The ecological crisis is therefore still viewed and approached from the perspective of human self-interest and not from the conviction of love for the rest—indeed, for all—of God’s creation or from a sense of responsibility for the survival and welfare of whatever is not human on our planet. This complicates matters, for it is difficult to arrive at a common mind on the sacrifices that ought to be demanded of us as individuals in order to face the ecological problem in our consumerist society. Politicians find it extremely problematic to establish a scale of values that would satisfy humanity’s self-interests. If, for example, a government decides to close down a certain factory on account of its pollution, unemployment will almost inevitably emerge as the principal problem in that area, replacing damage to the environment with poverty and hunger. Even the most competent politicians or technocrats will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to cope with such a situation as long as people’s motivation remains governed by self-interest. So motivation plays a definitive role in how the ecological problem is addressed, and it is clear that human self-interest must give way to other, nobler motives or be strongly conditioned and contained by them. This gives the spiritual and religious dimension decisive importance for the ecological issue, at least from the practical point of view. What kind of motivation, then, can religion offer people facing the ecological crisis? Here are some suggestions:

Emphasis on the Sacredness of Creation Stressing and promoting the idea of the sacredness of creation in all its aspects, spiritual as well as material, may be easier in cultures and societies where oriental religions are predominant, but could prove to be much more difficult where the Judeo-Christian tradition is the main religious force either historically or actually. Indeed, fear of paganism and a strong tradition of rationalism will make it difficult

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or sensitive to promote the idea of the sacredness of nature—or even of sacredness in general—in Western culture. In the Orthodox Church—behind whose tradition lie long battles against ancient Greco-Roman paganism—a spirituality involving a deep respect for nature is strongly conditioned by the view that nature acquires sacredness only in and through the human person. This gives humanity decisive importance and unique responsibility. A human is the priest of creation inasmuch as he or she freely turns creation into a vehicle of communion with God and one’s fellow human beings. This means that material creation is not treated as a means of obtaining pleasure and happiness for the individual, but as a sacred gift from God, which is meant to foster and promote communion with God and with others. Such a “liturgical” approach and use of nature by human beings leads to forms of culture which are deeply respectful of the material world while keeping the human person at the center.

A Drastic Revision of the Concept of Sin Sin has been normally understood, by Christian ethics at least, in anthropological and sociological terms alone, because nature came to be understood as a “servant” of humanity’s self-interest and pursuit of happiness. Sin thus became identified only with what caused harm to oneself or to other human beings. Obviously, damage to nature does not fall within such a category of “sin.” However, such a worldview changes if nature ceases to be the slave of human interests and becomes instead an indispensable link of communion between human beings and with God. Since humans cannot operate as agents of relationship and communion without nature—our bodies are both indispensable to our identity and inconceivable without the rest of creation—any harm inflicted upon nature would invariably render creation incapable of performing its function as a vehicle of communion between us and with God. Therefore, sin against nature is serious not only because it involves disrespect toward the divine gift of creation, but also— and chiefly—because it renders the human being incapable of fulfilling its relational nature. Human individualism goes hand in hand with sin against nature. The ecological crisis bears eloquent witness to that.

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Adopting a Spirit of Asceticism Asceticism has been associated in our minds with a devaluation of matter for the sake of “higher,” “nobler,” and more “spiritual” things. This, however, implies a Platonist view of matter and the body, which is not compatible with the Judeo-Christian tradition where the material world is an indispensable part of the human identity and destiny. While it may be true that a Platonist influence can be easily observed in the history of Christian thought and tradition—perhaps also in other religions—this is not of immediate concern to us here. For such types of asceticism, involving as they do a devaluation or contempt of the material world, aggravate instead of solving the ecological crisis. An “ecological asceticism”— if we may coin such a term—always begins with deep respect for the material creation, including the human body. Moreover, it builds on the view that we are not masters or possessors of God’s creation, but rather are called to transform the world into a vehicle of communion, always taking into account of and respecting its possibilities as well as its limitations. This last point is of paramount importance. Human beings must realize that the natural resources of the world are not unlimited. Creation as a whole is finite and so, too, are the resources that nature can provide for our needs. The prevailing consumerist philosophy of life in our time seems to ignore or deny this truth. We embrace and encourage growth and consumption by making “necessary” things which previous generations were easily able to live without. So we need to reconsider our concept of quality of life. Quality does not demand or imply quantity in order to exist. A restriction in our use of natural resources could lead to a life that is happier than the endless competition of producing and consuming, as well as spending and acquiring more and more. Qualitative growth must replace the current misconception of an economic development dominated by quantitative statistics. In turn, asceticism must cease to be a notion referring to a class of religious eccentrics or extremists and instead become synonymous with qualitative—rather than merely quantitative—progress in human societies and cultures. All this would inevitably involve major shifts of emphasis as well as basic revisions and redefinitions in political, economic, scientific, and social institutions of all kinds. It would probably amount to no less than a cultural revolution. Moreover, such a reorientation of

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our culture would require the involvement and cooperation of all the factors responsible for forming and fostering such an ascetic or countercultural revolution. Finally, all this could not be simply a matter of technocratic planning; it would require a change in people’s deeper convictions and motivations, since no human being can sacrifice anything without a reason or motive. Such reasons and motives can be characterized by either fear or love. Religions have conventionally employed both of these incentives. The ecological crisis we are facing seems to suggest fear—the fear of the destruction of our planet—as the prevailing motive for a change of direction. We must insist, however, on more positive motives. Love of God’s creation and our fellow human beings would lead us more naturally and more productively to restrict the consumption of natural resources in order to share them more justly and fairly with other people. This can be done through a process of education from the primary to the higher level, but perhaps nothing can be more effective for such a purpose than religion and the spirituality that stems from it. This is why every effort must be made to involve the religious communities in the environmental challenges of our time.

16 Communion and Communication

We are now living in a world of communication and a world which is therefore ever shrinking. The problem facing us today is how to cope with the vast range of information that is available to us, and how to use it as we should. This is especially a problem for the Church, which is used to a much slower pace of information provision, and which generally prefers it so. However, we can no longer ignore the reality of communication in modern life. That said, communication is becoming all the more problematic, inasmuch as it challenges the basic foundations of our lives. In this regard, communication both represents and reflects the positive aspects of our lives, but at the same time also threatens the very quality of that life. Two questions need to be addressed here: What does communication mean in theological terms? And how can communication be applied to ecology? On the one hand, communication is deeply rooted in creation. All beings communicate first with each other and second from generation to generation. Communication is a God-given reality, the absence of which can be equated with death. On the other hand, ecology is about allowing creation not just to be but to live according to God’s laws, one of which is communication. So therefore a fundamental ecological concern is how to allow creation to communicate. When we destroy the natural environment we stop the flow of communication as an integral part of creation. The human being is the most gifted communicator, due to its intelligence and rationality, through which it is capable of rendering the world an object of its thinking and reason. The human being transmits not just a reflection

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of the world, but ideas, history, scientific knowledge, culture, and— most importantly for the Church—tradition. Today importance is placed on communication through technology, especially computers. Computer communication assumes human superiority over nonhuman existence, and this accounts at least in part for the appearance of environmental problems. The ecological crisis emerges along with human contempt for “lower” forms of existence. The development through Enlightenment which humans have experienced views human rationality as the primary thing in existence. Computer communication is a child of this Enlightenment, just as the ecological crisis also is. Computer communication leads to a separation of human life from nature, for example through immediate access to the internet, instant availability shopping channels, and so on. If this continues, we will not need any relationship with nature at all; instead, we will have a false sense of individualism. The question is, then, are we going to use the internet to save the environment? And if not what means can we use when most other forms of communication have been replaced?

Five Models of Communication The following are five models that I would propose as alternative means of communication:

Trinitarian Model This model is based on the faith that God is Trinity, a circle of communion in Himself. Communication takes place within God Himself, through transmission of and through each person of the Holy Trinity. In accordance with this model, it is important to note that we can transmit information outside ourselves or we can actually transmit ourselves. Communication is closely related with communion; without communion there is no communication.

Ecclesiological Model In order for communication to take place, what is necessary is a community, a term that we are quickly forgetting. The Church

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communicates through the fact that it is an assembled community, and not through some external means of transferring information. However, we have unfortunately dissolved community life and replaced it with a heightened sense of individualism, which is another reason that has led to the environmental problem.

Eucharistic Model By teaching people to recognize nature as a gift from God, which is to be returned in gratitude to God, we are communicating an ecological ethos.

Kerygmatic (or Didactic) Model This model involves an apocalyptic view of events, appealing to people’s consciences, calling to repentance, and so on. Priests and religious leaders must speak out on ecological sin—that is, on the sin against nature—in their sermons, Sunday schools programs, and every teaching moment. In accordance with this model, it is not just how we communicate but what we actually communicate that matters. The content of our communication should include a new concept of sin.

Ascetical Model This model involves creating within people an ethos of treating nature with self-restraint, of using nature without greed, which is a very difficult task in a consumerist society, inasmuch as it goes against its economic interests. In this respect, it becomes imperative to maintain the monastic or ascetic tradition.

Application of These Models We cannot ignore or bypass media communication; instead, we must use it to communicate our ecological concerns. For example we can use the internet in order to send messages or information regarding ecological destruction. Realistically, we cannot communicate

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without the internet, even though it is partly responsible for creating the problem in the first place. We must sometimes use evil to cure evil. However, if we do not complement communication with the alternative models outlined earlier, then the outcome will not be good. Communication can create a false reality, and we will end up communicating a lie instead of a truth. Nevertheless, if we adopt and apply the aforementioned models we will positively contribute to the development of human beings, using communication with an awareness of what is good and bad. Furthermore, although we cannot entirely reject the mass media, we must be careful not to turn human beings into a “mass” rather than into a community. We must encourage personal communication as much as possible. We must use communication with critical awareness and ecological sensitivity, along with the development of a community conscience. In this effort, the Church must not just follow the fashionable trends, but it must actively articulate and contribute its own unique message.

17 Pope Francis and Laudato Si’ 1

I should like to begin by expressing my deep gratitude for the honor to be invited to take part in this event of launching the new Encyclical of His Holiness Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’.2 I am also honored by the fact that His All-Holiness, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, has asked me to convey to you his personal joy and satisfaction for the issuing of the Encyclical. As some of you may already know, the Ecumenical Patriarchate has been the first one in the Christian world to draw the attention of the world community to the seriousness of the ecological problem and the duty of the Church to voice its concern and try to contribute with all the spiritual means at its disposal toward the protection of our natural environment. Thus, back already in the year 1989, Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios issued an Encyclical to the faithful Christians and to all people of good will, in which he underlined the seriousness of the ecological problem and its theological and spiritual dimensions. This was followed by a series of activities, such as international conferences of religious leaders and scientific experts, as well as seminars for young people, Church ministers, and so on under the auspices of the present Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, aiming at the promotion of an ecological consciousness among the

This work was first published in: Eco-Theology, Climate Justice and Food Security. Theological Education and Christian Leadership Development, eds. Dietrich Werner and Elisabeth Jeglitzka (Geneva: Globethics​.n​et Global Series 14, 2016), 316pp. ISBN: 978-2-88931-144-6 (here at 179–86). 2 Delivered in the new Synod Hall of the Vatican on June 18, 2015. 1

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Christians in particular and more widely in the community of men and women. The issuing of the Encyclical Laudato Si’ is, therefore, an occasion of great joy and satisfaction for the Orthodox. On behalf of them I should like to express our deep gratitude to His Holiness for raising his authoritative voice to draw the attention of the world to the urgent need to protect God’s creation from the damage we humans inflict on it with our behavior toward nature. This Encyclical comes at a critical moment in human history and will undoubtedly have a worldwide effect on people’s consciousness. Those who read the Encyclical will be impressed by the depth and the thoroughness with which the ecological problem is treated and its seriousness is brought out, together with concrete suggestions and proposals on how to act in order to face its consequences. There is in its pages food for thought for all: the scientist, the economist, the sociologist, and above all the faithful of the Church. My own comments will be limited to the richness of theological thought and spirituality of the Encyclical. Time and space prevent me from doing full justice to the treatment of these aspects. I shall limit myself to the following points: (a) the theological significance of ecology, (b) the spiritual dimension of the ecological problem, and (c) the ecumenical significance of the Encyclical.

Theology and Ecology What does ecology have to do with theology? In the traditional manuals of theology, there is hardly any place for ecology and the same is true for the academic curricula of the theological schools, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. The Encyclical devotes a whole chapter (ch. 2) to show the profound ecological implications of the Christian doctrine of creation. It points out that, according to the Bible, “human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships with God, with our neighbor and with the earth itself” (par. 66). This third relationship, that is, with the earth, has been very often ignored by Christian theology to such an extent that the American historian Lynn White Jr., in a now famous article in the periodical Scientist (1967), would accuse Christian theology for being responsible for the

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modern ecological crisis. For it is true that in Christian theology the human being has been so exalted above material creation as to allow humans to treat it as material for the satisfaction of their needs and desires. The human being has been de-naturalized and in its abuse and misuse of the biblical command to the first human couple—“increase and multiply and subdue the earth” (Gen. 1:28)—humanity was encouraged to exploit the material creation unrestrictedly with no respect for its integrity and even sacredness. This attitude to creation did not only lead to a misuse of the biblical doctrine but at the same time contradicted fundamental principles of Christian faith. One of them is the faith in the Incarnation of Christ. In assuming human nature, the Son of God took over material creation in its entirety. Christ came to save the whole creation through the Incarnation, not only humanity; for according to St. Paul (Rom. 8:22), “the whole creation groans in travail and is suffering” awaiting its salvation through humanity. The other fundamental principle of Christian faith that has important ecological implications relates to the very heart of the Church, which is the Holy Eucharist. In the celebration of the Eucharist, the Church offers to God the material world in the form of the bread and the wine. In this sacrament space, time and matter are sanctified; they are lifted up to the Creator with thankfulness as His gifts to us; creation is solemnly declared as God’s gift; and human beings instead of proprietors of creation act as its priests, who lift it up to the holiness of the divine life. This brings to mind the moving words of St. Francis of Assisi with which the Encyclical opens: “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth.” As St. Gregory Palamas and other Greek Fathers would put it, the whole of creation is permeated by God’s presence through His divine energies; everything declares God’s glory, as the psalmist says, and the human being leads this cosmic chorus of glorification to the Creator as the priest of creation. This way of understanding the place and mission of humanity in creation is common to both Eastern and Western Christian tradition, and is of particular importance for the cultivation of an ecological ethos.

The Spiritual Dimension As it emerges clearly from the Encyclical, the ecological crisis is essentially a spiritual problem. The proper relationship between

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humanity and the earth or its natural environment has been broken with the Fall both outwardly and within us, and this rupture is sin. The Church must now introduce in its teaching about sin the sin against the environment, the ecological sin. Repentance must be extended to cover also the damage we do to nature both as individuals and as societies. This must be brought to the conscience of every Christian who cares for his or her salvation. The rupture of the proper relationship between humanity and nature is due to the rise of individualism in our culture. The pursuit of individual happiness has been made into an ideal in our time. Ecological sin is due to human greed which blinds men and women to the point of ignoring and disregarding the basic truth that the happiness of the individual depends on its relationship with the rest of human beings. There is a social dimension in ecology which the Encyclical brings out with clarity. The ecological crisis goes hand in hand with the spread of social injustice. We cannot face successfully the one without dealing with the other. Ecological sin is a sin not only against God but also against our neighbor. And it is a sin not only against the other of our own time but also—and this is surely very serious—against the future generations. By destroying our planet in order to satisfy our greed for happiness, we bequeath to the future generations a world damaged beyond repair with all the negative consequences that this will have for their lives. We must act, therefore, responsibly toward our children and those who will succeed us in this life. All this calls for what we may describe as an ecological asceticism. It is noteworthy that the great figures of the Christian ascetical tradition were all sensitive toward the suffering of all creatures. The equivalent of a St. Francis of Assisi is abundantly present in the monastic tradition of the East. There are accounts of the lives of the desert saints which present the ascetic as weeping for the suffering or death of every creature and as leading a peaceful and friendly coexistence even with the beasts. This is not romanticism. It springs from a loving heart and the conviction that between the natural world and ourselves there is an organic unity and interdependence that makes us share a common fate just as we have the same Creator. Asceticism is an unpleasant idea in our present culture, which measures happiness and progress with the increase of capital and consumption. It would be unrealistic to expect our societies to adopt asceticism in the way St. Francis and the Desert Fathers of the East experienced it. But the spirit and the ethos of asceticism

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can and must be adopted if our planet is to survive. Restraint in the consumption of natural resources is a realistic attitude and ways must be found to put a limit to the immense waste of natural materials. Technology and science must devote their efforts to such a task. There is a great deal of inspiration and help that can be drawn from the Encyclical itself in this respect. Finally, spirituality must penetrate our ecological ethos through prayer. The Encyclical offers some beautiful examples of how to pray for the protection of God’s creation. From the prayers cited at the end of the Encyclical, I find the following extract moving: O God, bring healing to our lives, that we may protect the world and not prey on it that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction. Touch the hearts of those who look only for gain at the expense of the poor of the earth. Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation, to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey towards your infinite light. At this point I should like to mention that the Ecumenical Patriarchate decided as early as 1989 to devote September 1 of each year to praying for the environment. This date is according to the Orthodox liturgical calendar, going back to the Byzantine times, the first day of the ecclesiastical year. The liturgical service of the day includes prayers for creation and the Ecumenical Patriarchate commissioned a contemporary hymnographer from Mt. Athos to compose special hymns for that day. The 1st of September each year is now devoted by the Orthodox to the environment. Might this not become a date for such prayer for all Christians?3 This would mark a step toward further closeness among them. This brings me Following the example of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, in 2015, Pope Francis inaugurated September 1 as a day of prayer for the natural environment for the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world. The Anglican Communion followed suit in the same year. Moreover, in 2017, for the first time ever, Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew issued a joint statement on the occasion of September 1. 3

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to my last comment on the Papal Encyclical, namely its ecumenical significance.

The Ecumenical Significance of the Encyclical There are in my view three dimensions to ecumenism. The first we may call ecumenism in time, an expression frequently used by one of the greatest Orthodox theologians of the last century, the late Fr. Georges Florovsky. By this we mean the effort of the divided Christians to unite on the basis of their common tradition, the teaching of the Bible and the Church Fathers. This is the object of the theological dialogues which are taking place in the Ecumenical Movement of our time and it seems to be the predominant form of ecumenism. At the same time an ecumenism in space is also practiced through various international institutions, such as the World Council of Churches and similar ecumenical bodies which bring together the divided Christians so that the different cultural contexts in which they live may be taken into consideration in the search for unity. This has brought together Christians from Asia, America, Europe, Latin America, and so on—an expression of the universality of the Christian Church. To these two dimensions which have dominated the ecumenical scene for the last hundred years we must add, I think, a third one which is usually neglected, namely what I would call an existential ecumenism. By that I mean the effort to face together the most profound existential problems that preoccupy humanity in its entirety—not simply in particular places or classes of people. Ecology is without doubt the most obvious candidate in this case. I believe that the significance of the Papal Encyclical Laudato Si’ is not limited to the subject of ecology as such. I see in it an important ecumenical dimension in that it brings the divided Christians before a common task which they must face together. We live at a time when fundamental existential problems overwhelm our traditional divisions and relativize them almost to the point of extinction. Look, for example, at what is happening today in the Middle East: Do those who persecute the Christians ask them to

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which Church or Confession they belong? Christian unity in such cases is de facto realized by persecution and blood—an ecumenism of martyrdom. The threat posed to us by the ecological crisis similarly bypasses or transcends our traditional divisions. The danger facing our common home, the planet in which we live, is described in the Encyclical in a way leaving no doubt about the existential risk we are confronted with. This risk is common to all of us regardless of our ecclesiastical or confessional identities. Equally common must be our effort to prevent the catastrophic consequences of the present situation. Pope Francis’s Encyclical is a call to unity—unity in prayer for the environment, in the same Gospel of creation, in the conversion of our hearts and our lifestyles to respect and love everyone and everything given to us by God. We admit that we are deeply thankful for that.

Conclusion From Here to Where?

We have come to the end of this fascinating conversation. And its organizers are asking us to respond to the question: “From here, to where?” It is a very important question but also a very difficult one to answer. However, before we decide on the journey from here to the future, let us have a brief look at the events that have led us here in the first place. How did we arrive here? The summit we are concluding today has already a long history behind it. It all started with the reading of an article, by now a classic, in the periodical Science, published in 1967 by the American historian Lynn White Jr. and entitled “ The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis.” This article made me aware of the responsibility of Christian theology with regard to the emergence of ecological crisis. With the exaltation of the human being above the rest of creation and with its call to have dominion over it on the basis of the passage in the book of Genesis containing God’s commandment to Adam and Eve after their creation to “subdue the earth.” And although this article concentrated primarily on the Western Church and its effects on the world, self-criticism of the East appeared to be inevitable. And so the question immediately arose: Can the Orthodox Church remain indifferent toward the ecological problem? Is Orthodox theology also responsible for the problem that seems to threaten this earth, God’s creation? And how can the Orthodox Church contribute to its solution? Following this a proposal was submitted to the Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios, of blessed memory, who reposed in the Lord in 1989, to assume initiatives for the protection of the environment. The Patriarch and the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Throne of Constantinople approved this suggestion, which in turn led to a decision to issue an annual Patriarchal message, beginning in

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1989, to all people of good will to abstain from any activity that would damage the natural environment. In the same message, the first of September of each year was dedicated to prayers for the protection and preservation of the environment. Two years later, Patriarch Demetrios died and his successor to the Apostolic See of St. Andrew, the present Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, not only continued but in fact increased and intensified the ecological activities of the Ecumenical Patriarchate with a series of summer seminars and international symposia, as well as numerous other means that rightly afforded him the title of “Green Patriarch.” The present symposium is the latest of these activities. Our hope is, with God’s grace, to continue and further such initiatives into the future. This somewhat long and broad history of the ecological activities of the Ecumenical Patriarchate has taught us many lessons, among which we can list here only the most important ones. I. The Church itself has to review some of its theological and pastoral traditions in accordance with the patristic spirit, which has unfortunately been somewhat obscured in modern times as a result of influence from the West. Thus, (a) The importance of the human body as the link between humanity and the rest of nature must be stressed. The human being does not have a body; it is a body. This makes it part of creation and not a species that is above creation. (b) The human being is not a proprietor or even, as it is often thought and stated, a steward of creation. Rather, the human being is a priest of creation, who is called to cultivate and refer creation to its creator as “his own of his own,” as the Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox Church constantly reminds us. (c) The human being cannot treat nature as mere resources, turning it into some-thing, but must develop a dimension of love and respect toward the laws that govern its constitution. Any disturbance or upsetting of the laws of nature immediately affects the human being itself. (d) The concept of sin must be enlarged to include also the sin against the natural environment in whatever

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form this might take place. This might actually be a revolution in the history of the Church and its theology. After all, thus far, and perhaps still to this day, at least to a great extent, no priest would tell the faithful that they have committed a sin and have to repent accordingly because they have polluted the environment. Unfortunately, this is totally outside of the agenda of our confession of sins. So it has to be introduced. This is precisely something that emerged from our ecological symposia. II. These and other lessons emerged from laying aside any narrow-minded or closed-eye perception between theology and science. (a) All the ecological symposia of the Patriarchate so far have involved this open dialogue. Distinguished scientists challenged the religious leaders and were equally challenged by them. Thus, science has taught us, and has taught theology, to take seriously the organic relationship of humanity with the animal and natural world. The famous theory of evolution—which is not a theory actually inasmuch as it is accepted today by everybody—to which the Church has very often reacted negatively, in fact has very crucial implications for ecology. (b) On the other hand, theology has also challenged science, encouraging it to abandon its purely analytical method, which fragments, subdues and uses nature, and to develop a more holistic approach in its methodology. From our experience in these encounters, we have learned that religion and science do not perform a complimentary role where science presenting rationality and religion proposes spirituality. This was the simplistic understanding of both disciplines in the past. Instead, science and religion interpenetrate one other because they are both dealing with the same object, namely humanity’s relation to nature. These are but a few of the benefits, which resulted from the dialogues between religion and science during the ecological

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initiatives pioneered by the Ecumenical Patriarchate. We have discovered and established that religion and science alike have to do with humanity’s relation to nature. There is still a great deal to gain from this dialogue as the present symposium with the richness of its presentations and discussions has revealed to us. Three main areas have been covered by our keynote presentations, responses, and discussions, although in the Halki Summit we have rightly included the dimension of economy and business. One of these has to do with biodiversity and conservation, which highlighted the need to protect animal species from extinction. Yet, as Dr. Jane Goodall pointed out, one must at the same time always caring for the needs of human beings, which are integrally interrelated. This balance is not always easy to maintain because the human being is so greedy that it never knows where its real needs stop and where its greed begins. The second area concerned energy and climate change. Our keynote speaker, Bill McKibben, warned us about the seriousness of the climatic situation and the danger of the destruction of the planet for the exclusive purpose of making money. The third and final area concerned economy and innovation with fascinating suggestions and experiments in food production by Gary Hirshberg, as well as a captivating discussion of the interconnectedness of the financial, employment and environmental crisis facing our world today by Dr. Amory Lovins. We have come to appreciate how the world financial system is today a global image, which calls for competent world leadership. The comprehensive richness of a symposium like this can only be summed up and presented in its fullness, which may be gleaned through the publication of its representative papers. We can only express our gratitude for what the Halki Summit has contributed to the ecological initiatives of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and we sincerely thank you all for that. And now: From here to where? Well, the easy answer is, of course, to another symposium. The difficult answer, however, is how our suggestions may be implemented and how the ecological situation can improve with the help of a fruitful cooperation between religion, economy, and science. Permit me attempt to offer some personal thoughts on this question. The first obvious thing that must follow without delay is a program of education of the clergy in the first place and also at

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public schools of all degrees. Ecology must permeate all sermons, all Sunday schools, of theological and scientific literature and so forth, wherever and as much as possible. We’ve been unpardonably incompetent and insufficient in this regard. The most difficult thing, however, will be how to bring the ecological concern into our broader culture. I have been stressing this point for years now. We need an ecological ethos, not an ecological ethic. An ethic is a matter of principles that can be taught at school or even put into the form of love. An ethos is a matter of attitudes that one takes as a result of habits acquired through one’s incorporation into community already from the time of one’s birth and growth in family and society. That habit requires the symbolic language of a community. It is not taught by an appeal to rationality, but acquired by nurture and tradition. The problem is that society, at least or especially in the West, has to a large extent lost its character of community and is no longer operating with symbols provided normally in the past by religion. Secularization has concentrated all its efforts in the realm of rationality, and so, too, has the Church, particularly since the Enlightenment. Thus we have to wait until a child grows enough to conceive rational principles in order to educate it ecologically. Nevertheless, this might prove to be too late, especially in the case of a culture and environment, which are not very congenial to an ecological ethos. Such a culture and environment are today created by technology, particularly in its use and focus on computer. This kind of technology de-bodies and de-materializes culture by encouraging and developing means of communication between human beings that bypass or surpass the human body, through which the human being actually experiences its interdependence with nature. People now relate to one another without the mediation of the body and all of the special temporal conditions provided by the natural environment. The natural environment is thus rendered redundant by technology. Technology does not merely pollute nature; it may even clean it. However, it renders it utterly useless. Today, you don’t have to touch someone’s body in order to relate to him or her. It is sufficient to use the internet in order to be online or in order to be in touch.

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In saying these things, I am fully aware that I shall be met with strong objections, particularly on two counts. There are those who worship computer technology so much that they are totally blind to its ecological consequences. With such people, there seems to be no ground for agreement whatsoever, no ground for discussion. There is another objection, however, that must be taken seriously. Technology has engrained and established itself so deeply and so strongly in our culture that it would be totally unrealistic to reject it in order to save the environment. In this case, the only option before us is to minimize its use as much as possible. I have in mind the example of the monastery of Chrysopiyi (that denotes the “lifegiving spring”) in Crete (Greece). We have heard something at this gathering from representatives of this monastery. They have constructed a church, to be consecrated by His All-Holiness in September 2012, by using only human hands, without the use of machinery, and by fully respecting nature. This, and only this, can be called an ecological ethos in the true sense of the term. The rest are compromises out of necessity and, if we are to be sincere with ourselves, they have to be admitted as such. In my opinion, there seem to be two kinds of ecology: one that I would call “radical ecology,” and another that could be called “managerial ecology.” Radical ecology would use the minimum means of technology, or none at all, and would be prepared to sacrifice economy or reduce the living standards, thereby advocating what we may call an “ecological asceticism.” The other kind of ecology, the managerial one, would not only avoid renouncing technology but use it by placing it in the service of a safer, improved environment. This kind of ecology would not only retain economy, but would use the environment to enhance it with the assistance of technological innovation. Where does religion belong in all this? If it is to be true to its nature, religion cannot but belong to what I have called radical ecology. This is particularly true about the Orthodox Church with its strong Eucharistic (or sacramental) and ascetical (or monastic) tradition. Science, on the other hand, nowadays turns toward the managerial type of ecology inasmuch it is increasingly absorbed by technology. Our confidence has been dominated, as we all know, by a managerial ecology and the element of religion has been either deliberately withdrawn or sadly absent from it. This only highlights

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the need for a real dialogue between these two kinds of ecology. Surely it is an exciting prospect for the future. Therefore, the journey from here to the future is not going to be an easy one. The ecological crisis will persist, for it is in fact a cultural crisis. So long as we remain unwilling to challenge the assumptions of our culture with the help of religious principles, the ecological problem will remain with us. Yet, we must persist. We have no choice but to follow the journey even if we do not know what its final destination will be. In the words of Constantine Cavafy, the great Greek poet, in his classic poem entitled Ithaca: “It is the journey to Ithaca, not Ithaca itself that matters in the end.” We promise to continue the journey for the sake of this beautiful world that God has granted us and entrusted in our hands to keep and cultivate it.

ORIGINAL PUBLICATIONS

Chapter 1: “St. Paul and the Ecological Problem.” Published here for the first time. Chapter 2: “The Book of Revelation and the Natural Environment.” In Creation’s Joy I, 2–3, 1996. Reprinted here in solemn and affectionate memory of Charles Bradley. Chapter 3: “Creation Theology: An Orthodox Perspective.” Published here for the first time. Chapter 4: “Orthodoxy and the Ecological Crisis” In The Environment and Religious Education: Presentations and Reports. Summer Session on Halki 1994 (Istanbul: Melitos Publications, 1997), 26–30. Reprinted here with kind permission of Metropolitan Tarasios of Rhodopolis, director of the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, California. Chapter 5: “A Theological Approach to the Ecological Problem.” Published here for the first time. Chapter 6: “An Orthodox Response to the Environmental Challenge.” In So that God’s Creation might live. The Orthodox Church responses to the ecological crisis, Proceedings of the Inter-Orthodox Conference on Environmental Protection. Crete 1991 (Bialystok: Ecumenical Patriarchate, with Syndesmos, 1991), 19–25. Reprinted here with kind permission of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Chapter 7: “Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology,” King’s Theological Review, vol. XII-XIII, 1989–90, Sourozh 39 (1990): 1–11; 40 (1990): 31–40; and 41 (1990): 28–39. Republished in The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. Luke ben Tallon (T&T Clark, London/NY, 2011), 143–75. Reprinted here with kind permission of T&T Clark.

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Chapter 8: “The Eucharistic Vision of the World.” In The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. Luke ben Tallon (T&T Clark, London/NY, 2011), 123–31. Reprinted here with kind permission of T&T Clark. Chapter 9: “Proprietors or Priests of Creation?” Baltic Symposium (June 2, 2003). In John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz (eds), Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013), 163–71. Reprinted here with kind permission of Fordham University Press. Chapter 10: “Ethics versus Ethos: A Brief Sketch.” Published here for the first time. Chapter 11: “Toward an Environmental Ethic.” Adriatic Symposium, June 6, 2002. In Neal Ascherson and Andrew Marshall (eds), The Adriatic Sea, a Sea at Risk, a Unity of Purpose (Athens: Religion, Science and the Environment, Text Ltd Publications, 2003), 93–101. Reprinted here with sincere gratitude to and in affectionate memory of Maria Becket. Chapter 12: “Religion and Science: A Theological Approach.” In Sarah Hobson and Lawrence Mee (eds), The Black Sea in Crisis: Religion, Science and Environment, Symposium II (London: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2000). Reprinted here with sincere gratitude to and in affectionate memory of Maria Becket. Chapter 13: “Humanity and Nature: Learning from the Indigenous.” Keynote address at the Amazon Symposium (July 20, 2006). Published here for the first time. Chapter 14: “Man and Animals.” Published here for the first time. Chapter 15: “Ecological Asceticism: A Cultural Revolution.” In Our Planet: The United Nations Environment Programme Magazine for Sustainable Development, Vol. 7, no. 6 (1996), 7–8. Reprinted here with kind permission of UNEP Publications. Chapter 16: “Communion and Communication.” Published here for the first time. Chapter 17: “Pope Francis and Laudato Si’.” In Dietrich Werner and Elisabeth Jeglitzka (eds), Ecotheology, Climate Justice, and Food Security (Globethics​.ne​t, 2015), 179–186. This work was first published in Eco-Theology, Climate Justice and Food Security. Theological Education and Christian Leadership Development, (eds) Dietrich Werner/Elisabeth Jeglitzka (Geneva: Globethics​.n​et Global

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Series 14, 2016), 179–86. Reprinted here with kind permission of Globethics​.ne​t. Conclusion: “From Here to Where?” In John Chryssavgis and Michele Goldsmith (eds), Sacred Commerce. A Conversation on Environment, Ethics, and Innovation (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2014), 97–104. Reprinted here with kind permission of Holy Cross Orthodox Press.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Books by Metropolitan John [Zizioulas] of Pergamon Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985. Communion & Otherness. Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, Paul McPartlan (ed.). London: T&T Clark, 2006. The Eucharistic Communion and the World, Luke Ben Tallon (ed.). London: T&T Clark, 2011. Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, Douglas H. Knight and Katerina Nikolopulu (eds.). London: T&T Clark, 2009. The One and the Many. Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today, Gregory Edwards (ed.). Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010.

2. General Bibliography Chryssavgis, John. Creation as Sacrament: Reflections on Ecology and Spirituality. London: T&T Clark, 2019. Chryssavgis, John, ed. On Earth as in Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012. Nantsou, Theodota and Nikolaos Asproulis. The Orthodox Church Addresses the Climate Crisis. Athens-Volos: WWF Greece and Volos Academy for Theological Studies, 2021. Theokritoff, Elizabeth. Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009. Ware, Metropolitan Kallistos (of Diokleia). Through the Creation to the Creator. London: Friends of the Centre Papers, 1997.

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3. Books Cited in This Volume Barrow, J. D. and Tippler, F. J. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. De Unamuno, Miguel. Del sentimiento tragica de la vita, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch. New York: Dover; reissued by Fontana Library Edition, 1962. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Demons: A Novel in Three Parts, trans. Robert A. Maguire. London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2008. Florovsky, Georges. Creation and Redemption, Collected Works vol. 3. Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing, 1976. Sorabji, Richard. Time, Creation and Continuum. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1990. Reissued in 2015 by Bristol Classical Press, London. Strawson, P. F. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. Abingdon: Routledge, 1990. Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, ed. A. M. Allchin. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1995. Torrance, T. F. The Ground and Grammar of Theology: Consonance between Theology and Science. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001. White, Lynn Townsend, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 10, 1967): 1203–7.

INDEX OF NAMES

Aristotle  11, 28, 56, 97, 114, 138, 177 Athanasius, St.  12–13, 26, 187 Augustine, St.  10, 34, 41, 55–6, 64, 75–6, 100, 125, 129, 161, 188–9, 201 Bacon, Francis  9, 21, 66, 144, 190, 193–4 Barrow, J. D.  70 Barth, Karl  112 Bartholomew (Ecumenical Patriarch)  3, 5, 9, 37, 160, 184, 186, 214, 218, 222 Basil, St.  69, 202 Boethius  64, 100, 189 Buber, Martin  167 Carter, Brandon  36 Cavafy, Constantine  227 Clement of Alexandria  75 Copernicus  36 Cyril of Jerusalem  104 Darwin, Charles  42, 56, 85, 126, 146–7, 158, 166, 201 Demetrios (Ecumenical Patriarch)  6, 22, 214, 221–2 Descartes, René  9–10, 21, 24, 41, 56, 64–5, 76, 101, 144, 177–9, 189–90, 193–4, 205 de Unamuno, Miguel  115 Dionysius the Areopagite  43

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor  123 Duhem, Pierre  177 Einstein, Albert  102 Evagrius of Pontus  10, 41, 201 Florovsky, Georges  1, 11–12, 15, 68, 111, 219 Francis (Pope)  5–6, 8, 214–20 Francis of Assisi, St.  216–17 Galileo  177–8 Gerasimus (Abba)  198 Gregory of Nyssa  40, 51, 122, 148, 166 Gregory Palamas, St.  216 Habgood, John  178 Hawking, Steven  61 Heidegger, Martin  48, 194 Ignatius of Antioch  17, 51, 136 Irenaeus of Lyons  16, 39, 41, 58, 75, 108, 112, 117, 125, 129 Isaiah (Prophet)  197–8 Jaeger, Werner  177 Jaki, Stanley  177 Jeglitzka, Elisabeth  214 John Chrysostom, St.  139 John Moschus  198 John of Damascus, St.  88, 166 John the Divine  31 Justin Martyr  109

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Kant, Immanuel  9, 21, 144 Kyriakos the anchorite  198 Macarius of Alexandria  198 Macarius of Egypt  75, 100 Marcion  136 Mary of Egypt  198 Maximus the Confessor  2, 11, 15–16, 34, 43, 70, 75, 95, 100, 129, 149, 169, 201–2 Methodius of Olympus  25–6, 34, 68, 192, 201 Michelangelo  121 Origen of Alexandria  10, 25–6, 34, 41, 55, 64, 67–8, 75, 100, 110–11, 188, 192, 201 Paul (Apostle)  12, 21–30, 140, 153, 216 Philip (Duke of Edinburgh)  37 Photius, St.  166 Picasso  121 Plato  12, 39, 97, 107, 109–10, 114, 121, 157, 167, 177 Prodi, Romano  160

Savvas the blessed  198 Seraphim of Sarov  198 Sergius of Radonezh  198 Sherrard, Philip  181 Silouan of Mount Athos  198–9 Sorabji, Richard  110 Strawson, P. F.  114 Thomas Aquinas  112 Tippler, F. J.  70 Torrance, T. F.  119 Von Harnack, Adolf  136 Weber, Max  62, 77, 145, 201 Werner, Dietrich  214 White, Lynn Jr.  6, 9, 61, 74, 96, 205, 215, 221 Zizioulas, John (Metropolitan of Pergamon)  1–18 Zosimas (Elder)  198

INDEX OF TERMS

Anaphora (also eucharistia)  52, 103–4 animals  7, 27, 42, 45, 56, 69, 78, 85, 87, 102, 104, 120–1, 123, 126, 146–8, 158, 164, 166, 171, 180, 197–202, see also human as animal Anthropic Cosmological Principle  17, 28, 70, 169 anthropocentrism  7, 34, 77, 102, 164–5 anthropomonism  7, 34, 165 asceticism, ecological  8, 205–9, 217, 226

creation out of nothing (also ex nihilo)  7, 11–14, 39–40, 44, 48, 51, 57, 71, 83, 111–12, 114–18, 121–2, 137, 147 as gift  42–3 crisis, ecological  3–9, 17, 21–2, 25–6, 29–30, 32, 35, 37, 41, 45, 47–9, 52, 55–60, 62–3, 66, 72–4, 80, 88, 93, 95–6, 102, 105–6, 112, 131–2, 145–6, 153, 165, 167, 170, 175–6, 179, 182, 184, 187, 190, 193, 196, 201, 206–9, 211, 216–17, 220–1, 227 cultural dimension of ecology  151–2

biocentrism  164 capitalism  62, 77, 101, 201 cogito ergo sum  10, 56, 64–6, 76, 101, 189–90 communication (models of)  210–13 communion  2, 4, 6–7, 11, 14–16, 42, 44, 46–9, 51–2, 57–8, 60, 83–5, 87, 95, 99, 103, 125, 131, 139, 140–3, 149–50, 159, 164, 168–9, 201, 207–8, 210–13 cosmic liturgy  5, 95, 133, 169 cosmological propheticism (also prophecy)  34, 98–9 cosmos as creation  23 as ktisis  12, 16, 23, 38, 107

Darwinism  17, 101–2, 119–20, 180 ecology managerial  226 radical  226 ethics of creativity  166–7 environmental  161, 163–7, 169–70, 182 eschatological  169–70 of priesthood  158, 167–9 social  165–6 ethos, ecological  1, 7, 12, 50, 115, 169, 216, 218, 225–6 Eucharist as anthropology  138–40 as eschaton  141–2 as ethics  140–41

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as event  134–5 as hope  143 Eucharist Divine  25, 27, 76, 200 Eucharistic theology  24, 133 being  46 canon  104 cosmology  98–9 ethos  25, 159 experience  58, 60, 137 liturgy  32, 35, 104 prayer  99, 104 vision of the world  133–43 evil, ecological  51, 93 evolution (theory)  45, 69–70, 129, 146, 165, 180, 193, 202, 223 Fall (of Adam)  14–16, 28, 30, 34, 39, 46–9, 62, 80, 108, 124–6, 129–30, 150, 217 freedom  7, 11, 13–14, 16–17, 28, 33, 41–2, 45–6, 48, 50–1, 71–2, 83, 110, 121–7, 141, 147–9, 164, 166, 178, 184, 202 Gnosticism  11, 39, 55, 75, 82, 105, 108–9, 117 Homo eucharisticus  18, 48, 51 imago Dei (also in the image of God)  10, 17, 41, 45, 51, 56, 78–9, 84–5, 101, 105, 122, 124–7, 130–1, 148–9, 166 immortality of the soul  10, 15, 68 Judeo-Christian theology  62 tradition  34, 71, 110, 168, 187, 206, 208 likeness (of God)  45–6, 51, 77, 84, 122–3, 139, 148, 166

masters and possessors (of nature)  65, 179, 190, 205 microcosm  2, 11, 58, 68, 84, 149, 192 Neoplatonism  39, 55, 75, 109–10 paganism  40, 95, 97, 99, 105, 111, 131, 187, 195, 206–7 Platonism  32, 35, 39, 63, 75, 108–9, 110, 112, 188, 201 priesthood (of man)  58, 96, 104, 126, 130, 149, 151–2, 158, 168 priest of creation  2, 11, 16–18, 35, 42, 49, 95, 99, 104–5, 119, 123, 130, 146, 148–53, 168, 207, 216, 222 proprietor of creation  24, 114–23, 216, 222 reason (also rationality)  10, 41, 59, 78–9, 85, 88, 94–5, 100–2, 119–20, 122, 148, 162, 168, 177, 195–6, 202, 210 recapitulation (also anakephalaiosis)  34, 95–6, 130, 150 religion and science (cooperationdichotomy)  5–6, 160, 175–85, 223–4 science and theology  67, 179–80, 191 sin, ecological  8, 27, 151, 212, 217 stewardship (also steward of creation)  2, 14, 18, 24, 30, 42, 144–6, 151–3, 168, 222 technology  9, 21–2, 72, 77, 79–80, 101, 120, 127, 164–5, 184, 194, 211, 218, 225–6 Theosis (also divinization)  40, 46, 62, 161, 169, 201