The Dream of the Earth, Part 2

Fr. Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)

In The Dream of the Earth, Part 1 I introduced the thought of the ordained Passionist monk-priest Thomas Berry, who in his 94-year lifetime was both a historian of human cultures and an environmental prophet. His 1988 book The Dream of the Earth is a classic presentation of why all of us, Catholic or not, need to develop a spiritual connection to Planet Earth and all the life forms who represent our evolutionary cousins. Indeed, as products of the universe that our God has created, we must come to see — as the ancients saw — that we are but expressions of the energies of the cosmos.

A Functional Cosmology

In the book Berry discusses a number of other writers of his day who were making contributions to our ecological understanding of the Earth. Many, he says, made valuable points, and yet ...

... all of these writers fail ultimately because none is able to present data consistent within a functional cosmology. (p. 87)

That phrase, "functional cosmology," is key to Berry's ideas. He sees the cosmos — the universe — as having evolved over eons of time in a direction that produced stars and galaxies, then planetary systems like the Solar System, then habitable planets like our Earth. On one of those habitable planets — ours — life came into being. Out of our planet's evolutionary process came a single species — again, ours — whose members are conscious and able to reflect on themselves and on the cosmos-at-large that has generated them. Accordingly:

Neither humans as a species nor any of our activities can be understood in any significant manner except in our role in the functioning of the earth and of the universe itself. We come into existence, have our present meaning, and attain our destiny within this numinous context, for the universe in its every phase is numinous in its depths, is revelatory in its functioning, and in its human expression finds its fulfillment in celebratory self-awareness.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "numinous" as "filled with a sense of the presence of divinity: holy." Berry makes much of the fact that God's presence can be felt by us only through our celebration of nature, including of our own self-aware human nature.

Berry goes on:

Neither the psychological, sociological, nor theological approaches is adequate. The controlling context must be a functional cosmology.

"Cosmology," the dictionary says, is both "a branch of astronomy that deals with the origin, structure, and space-time relationships of the universe; also : a theory dealing with these matters" and "a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of the universe; a theory or doctrine describing the natural order of the universe." Berry embraced all of the scientific understandings of the universe that emerged during his lifetime, including Einstein's theories of relativity and the discovery of the big bang. Yet his use of the word "cosmology" bears the stamp also of the definition having to do with metaphysical theory and doctrine.

I think Berry's repeated use of the words "functional" and "functionally" is meant to denote the fact that the development of the universe over time has served the function of producing certain predestined outcomes, namely, self-aware life in a habitat such as ours, rich with fellow living creatures.

Berry's "New Story of the Universe"

Berry says next:

At this time the question arises regarding the role of the traditional religions. My own view is that any effective response to these issues [relating to environmental degradation] requires a religious context, but that the existing religious traditions are too distant from our new sense of the universe to be adequate to the task that is before us. We cannot do without the traditional religions, but they cannot presently do what needs to be done. We need a new type of religious orientation. This must, in my view, emerge from our new story of the universe. This constitutes, it seems, a new revelatory experience that can be understood as soon as we recognize that the evolutionary process is from the beginning a spiritual as well as a physical process.

Berry refers to "our new story of the universe." This is the story told to us by modern science, amplified by a sense of the numinous that Berry says has begun to creep into the thought of supposedly agnostic/atheistic scientists:

The difficulty so far has been that this story has been told simply as a physical process. Now, however, the scientists themselves are awakening to the wonder and the mystery of the universe, even in its numinous qualities. They begin to experience also the mythic aspect of their own scientific expressions. Every term used in science is laden with greater mythic meaning than with rational comprehension ...

At this point in Berry's presentation, I think mainly of the mysteries of quantum physics, and in particular the idea of "quantum entanglement." Two electrons, introduced to one another so that they are "entangled" and then separated by any amount of distance — say, halfway across the universe — will continue to act as mirror images of one another. If one is given clockwise "spin," for example, the other will instantly develop counterclockwise spin wherever it is.

What is the "mythic meaning" of the fact that in our universe elementary particles and even particles of light — photons — persistently dance with one another so? Who is the Lord of that Dance? What does She want of us? Who, then, are we in relationship to Her?

... Thus science has overcome its earlier limitations out of its own resources. As [mathematical cosmologist] Brian Swimme notes concerning scientists, "Their experience with the most awesome realities of the universe revealed a fantastic dimension that exceeded, exploded, and destroyed the language of the everyday realm." He notes further, "To speak of the diaphanous quality of matter or to speak of the cosmic dawn of the universe is to treat questions that every culture throughout history has confronted."

Matter, as is now known by science, has a "diaphanous quality" because at bottom all matter is energy, Einstein showed. Berry prophetically continues:

We are entering into a period that might be identified as the period of the Third Mediation. For a long period the divine-human mediation was the dominant context not only of religion, but of the entire span of human activities. Then, for some centuries of industrial [socioeconomic] classes and nation-states, a primary concern has been interhuman [i.e., human-to-human] mediation. Now the dominant mediation can be identified as earth-human mediation. The other two mediations will in the future be heavily dependent on our ability to establish a mutually enhancing human-earth presence to each other.

Earth as Subject, Not Object

Here, Berry treats the Earth, including all its life forms, as a "subject," not an "object." A subject is, as it were, a person. We capture this notion of the earth as a person who undergoes some sort of subjective experience when we refer to our natural environment as Mother Earth or Mother Nature.

If Mother Earth were not a subject but an object, we could exploit it — not Her, but It — at our will for our own satisfaction and pleasure. In fact, this is what we have been doing, quite wrongly, for several centuries now. But we have begun to realize that this course is unsustainable. If our life on this planet is to be sustained, so too must be the planet itself and every life system that has appeared on solid land, in mysterious seas, and in beautiful skies.

Berry adds:

The great value of this approach is that we have in the earth an extrahuman referent for all human affairs, a controlling referent that is a universal concern for every human activity. Whether in Asia or America or the South Sea Islands, the earth is the larger context of survival.

All human professions, institutions, and activities must be integral with the earth as the primary self-nourishing, self-governing and self-fulfilling community. To integrate our human activities within this context is our way into the future. 

In fact, as Berry prophesies in his book, the new age of "earth-human mediation" is our only way into the future.