The Dream of the Earth, Part 3

In two earlier posts in my The Dream of the Earth series, I set out the ecologically prophetic thought of the late Passionist priest Fr. Thomas Berry, as revealed in his book The Dream of the Earth.

It was when I come to Chapter 8 in the book, "The American College in the Ecological Age," that I really prick up my ears. My feeling is that American colleges and universities, having lost sight of their primary mission, have been going downhill since at least the time, 1988, when Berry wrote his book. They have not followed, as they should have, the advice Berry gives in this chapter: to reground the educational curriculum in the intellectual and spiritual wherewithal that can move us from our current scientific-technological-industrial age into the ecological age we need to enter now.

The Six Courses of the New College Curriculum

Berry proposes (see pp. 99-108) that six courses be put at the center of the new curriculum. To begin with:

A first course, perhaps the most difficult, would present the sequence of evolutionary phases of this functional cosmology [in which we could relate to the universe mainly in terms of what it has done and made over its billions of years of existence]: the formation of the galactic systems and the shaping of the [basic chemical] elements out of which all future developments took place; the formation of the earth within the solar system; the emergence of life in all its variety upon the earth; the rise of [our quintessentially human] consciousness and human cultural development. 

This course, if related to the stars we see, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we are nourished by, the earth we stand on, the natural life of the environment as well as the cities we inhabit, could provoke a profound sense of mutual presence of the student and the universe to each other. But, most powerfully, the student, looking at his or her own hand and considering the time span of fourteen billion years that it took [for the universe] to produce such a hand, could feel a personal importance in the scheme of things.

Next comes:

A second course in the proposed curriculum ... on the various phases of human cultural development: the Paleolithic phase, the Neolithic village phase, the period of the great religious cultures [around the world], the scientific-technological phase [that we are just exiting], and the emerging ecological phase. This course would enable the student to envisage a comprehensive human development in its historical stages as well as in its cultural differentiation. ... Thus a person could more easily appreciate the genius of the time when the languages of the human community took shape, when the religions and arts and social forms of the world were developed, when the great humanistic cultures [that for the first time stressed a human individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason] were formed, when the elementary technologies were invented, [and the person would come to] appreciate how the modern sciences emerged within the European cultural region, and the need now for a new adjustment of human modes of being and activity to the dynamics of the natural world.

Next, there would be:

A third course [that] might deal with the period of the great classical cultures that has dominated human development over the past several thousand years and which has given to the human community [our] more elaborated patterns of linguistic expression, of religious formation, of spiritual disciplines; its critical understanding in the arts and sciences and literature [in the sense of "exercising or involving careful judgment or judicious evaluation"]; its political and social structures; its ethical and legal norms; its advanced craft skills; and its popular recreations.

Here, Berry alludes to the "widely differentiated" cultural patterns "that cover the planet" and that "will always be present in the psychic structure of the human." From each of these cultural patterns, Berry writes, we can learn

... the powerful impact of the divine, the need for spiritual discipline, the majesty of art, the great literature and music and dance and drama which befits the human mode of being, as well as [learning how we have achieved] economic well-being through technological skills.

Whatever the future holds, Berry says the ways of life established by our species' various cultural patterns will still constitute

... the main principles of civilized order known to the human community. These traditions are still the most formidable barriers to chaos that the human community possesses. The problem, of course, is that these traditions cannot remain static; they must enter a new phase of their own history. No longer will each [cultural pattern] be isolated from the others, no longer will the economies of the various peoples be independent of the others.

Moving right along, Berry proposes:

A fourth course that might be proposed is the study of the scientific-technological phase of human development, culminating in the awakening of human consciousness to the time sequence in the story of the universe, of the earth, of life, and of the human community. ... This is the age of dominance of the human over the natural [world]; it is also the period when the numinous presence pervading the universe [i.e., the awe-inspiring presence of divine holiness] was diminished in human awareness in favor of a dominant preoccupation with human reason, human power, and the sense of the machine as the dominant metaphor for understanding the reality of things.

Yet Berry admits that the scientific-technological phase has also been one in which a "profound social consciousness" developed that would partially offset the "machine" metaphor of our physical existence, and "medical advance" and other developments gave us "release from many of the physical and social ills of former times."

Next:

A fifth course could deal with the emerging ecological age, the age of growing intercommunion among all the living and nonliving systems of the planet, and even of the universe entire. [This age] should concern itself with reestablishing the human in its natural context ... [within] the integral function of the biosphere [i.e., the totality of all living organisms taken together with their environment], the healing of the damage already done to the dynamics of the earth, the fostering of a renewable economic order by integration of the human [species] within the ever-renewing cycles of the natural world as they are sustained by solar energy.

In this emerging ecological age, Berry writes, we will need a revised approach to law that safeguards "the inherent rights of natural realities ... of living beings to exist and not be abused or wantonly used or exterminated ... ."

Medicine in the new age would come to "envisage the earth as primary healer," assisted by the physician in his or her newly understood role as interpreter of our health-giving "intercommunion with the earth, with its air and water and sunlight, with its nourishment and the opportunity it offers for the experience of human physical capacities. (In relating to this at-first puzzling point of Berry's, I find I can bring to mind the numerous instances told of in Ken Burns' PBS TV series The National Parks, which I am presently re-watching, in which various individuals such as John Muir are said to have repaired to unblemished, sublime nature to heal themselves of earthly afflictions.)

As for religion in the new age, Berry says it "would perceive the natural world as the primary revelation of the divine, as primary scripture, as the primary mode of numinous presence. Christian religion would cease its antagonism toward the earth and discover its sacred quality."

Commerce, for its part, would "recognize that a base exploitation of the planet — the poisoning of earth, air, and water — cannot be justified ... . [Our base exploitation of nature] is ultimately self-destructive for commerce as well as for the human community and constitutes an ultimate blasphemy against a sacred reality."

The Sixth Course and Today's Changing Sexual Morality

Finally, Berry discusses one more curricular need:

A sixth course [that] could be a course on the origin and identification of values. This course would seek to discover within our human experience of the universe just what can be a foundation for [our ethical and moral] values.

I find this sixth part of the curriculum to be of special significance because, as Berry writes,

Such a foundation for values should supply for our times what was supplied in medieval times by the doctrine of natural law [as defined by Thomas Aquinas]. This becomes especially urgent since we no longer accept [Thomas's] earlier doctrine of the fixed nature of things, which in former times determined the natural goodness or evil of things or actions. Obviously we cannot simply transpose values from the medieval to the modern period. We need to discover the values indicated by reality itself as we experience it.

I think this principle to be of especial importance in view of my earlier post, Catholics and Sex. In it I discussed how there is today a rift in the Catholic Church over the church's traditional teachings on issues of sexual morality: artificial birth control as it applies to individual marriages and also to global population control; abortion; homosexuality; masturbation; oral sex; the life-affirming value of nuptial sex; sex between unmarried people; priestly celibacy; the all-male priesthood vs. women's vocations; etc.

The common thread of the dispute, I tried to indicate, is that our church hierarchy insists on, in effect, "transposing values from the medieval to the modern period." The pope and the Vatican tell us that what the estimable Thomas Aquinas determined to be static and unchanging natural law still holds today in all matters, sexual and otherwise.

Liberals within the church, on the other hand, are in effect saying, "Not so!" Today's Catholics, and many of our non-Catholic cousins as well, experience their own reality differently than ever before, or so we liberals insist. Our modern experience of reality should now be permitted to affect and alter church doctrine from the bottom up. No longer is an imposed, top-down, static view of sexual morality valid.

The outcome of that dispute, it seems to me, will determine where the Catholic Church will go in the near and far future. It is an appropriate topic for this post about Thomas Berry's prophetic ecological vision because if the church hierarchy is correct about the static truth of natural law, then everything else Berry proposes about where the human race needs to be heading must be viewed with extreme skepticism.

But if the basic nature of a non-static universe, such as ours is, is its ability over time to evolve newly emergent natural realities, including changes in sexual do's and don'ts, then the church hierarchy has to be viewed as fundamentally wrong about unchanging natural law, and Berry must be given the benefit of the doubt as to his all-encompassing view of an ecological age to come!

The above discussion of how the church ought to willingly revise its teachings on sexual morality must not be construed as licensing any and all varieties of sexual expression in the new ecological age, though. When Berry speaks of ideas of "the powerful impact of the divine [and] the need for spiritual discipline" that come to us from "the period of the great classical cultures that has dominated human development over the past several thousand years," he does so with the greatest respect. Not having indiscriminate sex is a matter of proper spiritual discipline now, just as it was in the time of Thomas Aquinas. That "these traditions [that we inherit from the classical cultures] are still the most formidable barriers to chaos that the human community possesses" mandates that we in conscience redefine what spiritual discipline requires of us today — not that we throw such discipline entirely out the window.