The Dream of the Earth, Part 1

The Dream of the Earth, by Thomas Berry, ought to be required reading for any Catholic who is grappling, as I am still, with questions of how much our religious commitment ought to extend to concern for the earth and the natural world.

The book, whose author was an ordained Passionist monk who died at age 94 in 2009, appeared in 1988 under the imprint of Sierra Club Books. Unknown to me until quite recently, Berry was an advocate in a movement I'd been equally unaware of, Deep Ecology.

Deep Ecology has it that we ought to care about our planet and its natural environment first and foremost because our present ways will sooner or later bring ruin. Our plans for progress toward a "wonderworld" of human economic fulfillment are bound to fail, Berry says. We have to steal from Mother Nature to build our imaginary wonderworld. The bill for that is surely coming due.

We might justify "going green" by that reasoning alone, but Berry offers a deeper reason. We ought to care about the earth because in despoiling our world in the name of material progress, we risk losing

... contact with the revelation of the divine in nature. Yet our exalted sense of the divine itself comes from the earth, in all the splendid modes of its expression. Without such experience we would be terrible impoverished in our religious and spiritual development, even in our emotional, imaginative, and intellectual development. (pp. 80-81)

"Our fulfillment is not in our isolated human grandeur," Berry writes (p. xiv), "but in our intimacy with the larger earth community, for this is the larger dimension of our being. Our human destiny is integral with the destiny of the earth."

Berry's Thought

Few educated people today can disagree with Berry's basic framework of thought and belief. Our species emerged on this earth, which is the only known home for life in the universe, after billions of years and the earlier evolution of tens of thousands of our cousin species. The earth itself and its sun emerged in the cosmos after an even greater number of billions of years of expansion following the big bang.

Berry accordingly writes:

Such a fantastic universe, with its great spiraling galaxies, its supernovas, our solar system, and this privileged planet Earth! All this is held together in the vast curvature of space, poised so precisely in holding all things together in the one embrace and yet so lightly that the creative expansion of the universe might continue on into the future. We ourselves, with our distinctive capacities for reflexive thinking, are the most recent wonder of the universe, a special mode of reflecting this larger curvature of the universe itself. If in recent centuries we have sought to collapse the larger creative curve within the horizons of our own limited being, we must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world about us. The greater curvature of the universe and of the planet earth must govern the curvature of our own being. In the coincidence of these three curves lies the way into a creative future. (p. xv)

Ergo, we cannot go on leveraging the indiscriminate industrial-technological-agricultural destruction of numberless life forms and our natural environment as a whole without squandering the legacy of fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, a protracted process of development which produced the only life form anywhere, so far as we know, that can reflect on its own existence: us.

Certainly we know about divinity through Scripture and religious teaching, but, Berry says, we cannot fully savor the Creator's unimaginable greatness except through our experience of the natural world. If we turn that world into a trash heap in which we are reduced to being semi-alive and spiritually impoverished, we render the ultimate insult to God.

Berry puts it this way:

We should be clear about what happens when we destroy the living forms of this planet. The first consequence is that we destroy modes of divine presence. If we have a wonderful sense of the divine, it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence. If we have refinement of emotion and sensitivity, it is because of the delicacy, the fragrance, and indescribable beauty of song and music and rhythmic movement in the world about us. If we grow in our life vigor, it is because the earthly community challenges us, forces us to struggle to survive, but in the end reveals itself as a benign providence. But however benign, it must provide that absorbing drama of existence whereby we can experience the thrill of being alive in a fascinating and unending series of adventures. (p. 11)

Many Cultures and Their Creation Mythologies

In one of his early essays — each chapter in his book amounts to a self-contained essay — Berry recites a history of "creative energy" in our world. He writes (p. 25), "Belief in a personal creative energy principle is the primary basis of Western spiritual tradition. Thus the creed opens with a reference to power as the distinguishing attribute of the creative principle of heaven and earth and all things."

Berry refers here to the start of the Nicene Creed which we say at every Catholic Mass:

I believe in One God, the Father, the Almighty
Maker of all that is, seen or unseen ...

Power and energy — almightiness — are crucial to Berry's worldview; he believes the universe itself reveals "creative intentions." Even so:

Unfortunately Western religious traditions have been so occupied with redemptive healing of a flawed world that they tend to ignore creation as it is experienced in our times. ... So concerned are we with redemptive healing that once healed, we look only to be more healed. We seldom get to our functional role within the creative intentions of the universe. (p. 25)

"In an earlier phase of human development," Berry continues, "creation mythologies provided the basic context for personal and social existence. In accord with these great mythic statements the various cultural forms were established."

The Archetypal Age of Antiquity

We need to keep in mind here that our Christian creation myth, the first chapter of Genesis, is what tells us that our Lord God is "Maker of all that is, seen and unseen." Before our modern times, it and innumerable kindred creation myths powered the development of various civilizations in the world. "Thus," writes Berry (p. 26), "the sages, rishis, yogis, gurus, priests, philosophers, prophets, heroes, and divine kings of antiquity: Confucius, Buddha, Ignathon, Moses, Isaiah, Darius, Ch'in Shi Huang Ti, Asoka, Plato, Christ, and, later, Mohammed."

Those great figures of antiquity and their successors in recent times, says Berry, "have been instrumental in keeping the energy level of the various civilizations sufficient to carry on the basic functions required for their continuance."

Civilization's "Basic Energy Structure"

The "personal energy principle" of which Berry speaks amounts to, in other words, "a basic energy structure" (p. 27). This basic structure is of a kind which fuels every civilization, including our own.

This basic energy structure, inflected through the classical pagan cultures that preceded our Judeo-Christian one, "was a kind of energy pulsating in and through sacred liturgies carried out in seasonal life periods, as well as in the personal life cycle from birth to maturity to death." According to the prevailing mystery religions of the time, nothing ever really changed. Decay and death led inexorably to new life and growth.

A New Interpretation of Myth and Ritual

But the modern period introduced a new interpretation of myth and a "new historical mode of thinking." Now the ceaseless ebb and flow of life in the world developed, for the very first time, a vector of "progress." Berry writes of the new mode of thinking:

The world was [now] a one-time emerging world. There was no established cosmos, no abiding society, only a cosmogenesis and a sociogenesis. The evocation of energies continued within the ancient patterns, but these patterns themselves came to be interpreted within a new historical context. (p. 27)

So, in our modern Western world, our Christian "evocation of energies" — our rituals, prayers, creation myth, scripture — came to be reinterpreted in such a way as to harness them to a secular vision of man-made, earthly progress.

The Secular "Millennium"

Berry shows that the dream of the modern world to control nature and turn it to the economic benefit of humankind, leading to our eventually inhabiting an "industrial wonderworld" (p. 29), is just a secular borrowing of ancient biblical prophecy:

Although this new vision was first set forth in the prophetic writings and in the apocalyptic visions of Daniel [in the Old Testament], it found its most effective presentation in the Revelation of John the Divine [the final book of the New Testament], especially in his reference to the "millennium," the thousand years at the end of the historical process when the great dragon would be chained up, when peace and justice would appear, and when the human condition would be decisively surmounted. This millennial vision is the source of what may be the most powerful psychic energies ever released on the earth, psychic energies that have eventually taken extensive control over the physical functioning of the planet and are now entering into control of its biological systems. (p. 28)

Our "Mythic Addiction" Today

Berry says we are creating not a "wonderworld," but a "wasteworld" instead. Our world has become "anthropocentric," centered on our own needs and wants, rather than "biocentric," centered on the prerogatives of the living earth from which our species derives. Our secular reinterpretation of the religious myth of the "millennium" has been driving all this. Our secular co-opting of religious myth has gotten to the point where it controls us rather than us controlling it:

We could describe our industrial society as counterproductive, addictive, paralyzing, [a] manifestation of a deep cultural pathology. Mythic addictions function something like alcohol or drug addictions. even when they are obviously destroying the addicted person, the psychic fixation does not permit any change ... . (p. 32)

Our Need for a New Myth

We now need to replace our current, dysfunctional "mythic commitment" with what Berry poetically calls "a mystique of the rain." This amounts to a new mythic font of psychic energy:

A taste for existence within the functioning of the natural world is urgent. Without a fascination with the grandeur of the North American continent, the energy needed for its preservation will never be developed. Something more than the utilitarian aspect of fresh water must be evoked if we are ever to have water with the purity required for our survival. There must be a mystique of the rain if we are ever to restore the purity of the rainfall.

Berry's Prophetic Voice

I hear Berry's voice as more prophetic than mythic, though. I mean "prophetic" an an Old Testament, Biblical sense of calling us back to a prior commitment from which we have fallen away. The commitment Berry has in mind is not that of Yahweh's original people, but more like that of Christianity in the West prior to the Enlightenment.

Yet it must also be a return to the commitment that all of earth's peoples have in fact made, from pre-Neolithic times on. If humankind's needs are once again to turn to "the natural fruitfulness of the earth" for their sustainable satisfaction, that's the commitment that all of us need now to make. "This is not a socialism on the national scale," Berry writes (p. 79),

... nor is it an international socialism, it is planetary socialism. It is a socialism based on the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas [Aquinas], wherein he deals with the diversity of creatures. Beyond planetary socialism he proposes an ultimate universal socialism where he says that because the divine goodness "could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, he produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates [in] the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever."

Into the Future

Yet Berry does not want to turn back the clock. We cannot move back in time — only forward. Berry writes that we need a renewal that can propel us into the future, not a return to the past:

Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but to call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being. Our only hope is a renewal of those primordial experiences out of which the shaping of our more sublime human qualities could take place. While our own experiences can never again have the immediacy or the compelling quality that characterized this earlier period, we are experiencing a postcritical naiveté, a type of presence to the earth and all its inhabitants that includes, and also transcends, the scientific understanding that is now available to us from these long years of observation and reflection.

Berry by no means rejects the scientific understanding of the world that began for us "in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century work of Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton" (p. 40). It is just that we must now turn the insights our empirical science has given us toward the work of healing the earth, not conquering it.