The Dream of the Earth, Part 4

In the earlier posts in my The Dream of the Earth series, I've been setting forth the ecologically prophetic thought of the late Passionist priest-monk Fr. Thomas Berry, as detailed in his 1988 book The Dream of the Earth. Berry (1914 - 2009) had what I'd call a "panoptic view" of our world and universe. He presents in his book a comprehensive, panoramic view of all that is truly important in understanding the ecological age we presently need to be embarking on and how it must contrast with the earlier ages of humankind.

Berry says we can begin transitioning into an ecological age when we realize that science has given us a new creation story. In the twentieth century, human scientists discovered how to listen to the cosmic background radiation reaching us from the far fringes of the universe, and from it to discover the age of the cosmos, which is some 14 billion years old. We figured out that it all started with a big bang, a veritable explosion out of nothing of huge amounts of energy, some of which firmed into the first subatomic particles. A rapid evolution took place over the first fractions of a second, then over larger and larger durations of time, as the primordial stuff that eventually coalesced into galaxies and stars sped outward alongside the expanding reach of the cosmos.

Some of the starstuff, deep in stars' interiors, was turned into elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. After being expelled from an exploding star and traveling amid its own galactic cousins, a rich mix of chemical elements cooled and made planets, including Earth. Our planet appeared some 4.6 billion years ago. The first living cells arose on it 3.7 billion years ago. Complex cells containing a nucleus and other internal structures appeared 2 billion years ago. Multicellular life, 1 billion years ago. The earliest aquatic animal life is 600 million years old. Plants on land, 475 million years old. Mammals, 200 million years. Flowering plants, 130 million years. Our own genus of mammals, Homo, 2.5 million years. Our own species in particular is only 200,000 years old.

Berry focuses intently on the fact that our kind is the only known species in the universe that is conscious, in the sense of being sentient or self-aware. Only we can contemplate the universe in its evolving totality and consider our destined place in it. This is what gives us our meaning today, both collectively and individually.

Our species has always had its creation stories, in every culture and every time. Our Western, Judeo-Christian culture's first creation story — the first of the two told in the Book of Genesis — concerns what the Lord God did "in the beginning" to make the world and all its living kinds. (Our second creation story is the one about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.)

From our societies' creation stories, no matter what our religious culture and time period, we have always derived our idea of the world's meaning and our own identity. For example, when we are told in Genesis, chapter one, verse 31, "And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" — having heard our own species' inception told of earlier in the same story — we know something crucial about who and what we are.

Now, today, we have a scientific creation story — the big bang, etc. — that unites us all, in every culture. And not just geographically in a spatial dimension, but evolutionarily in the dimension of time. All of cosmic evolution since the big bang has had as its upshot a species which can contemplate ... all of cosmic evolution since the big bang.

Our Disastrous Impact on the Earth

Yet this same species has altered the geology, chemistry, and biology of its own planet in disastrous ways, Berry says. Not only is what we have done to plunder the earth unconscionable, it is unsustainable as well. We will have to change our ways.

That is why we have of necessity begun to embark upon an ecological age. And in that age, there will be a reconfiguration of our entire palette of Western religious and spiritual values.

In his chapter called "Christian Spirituality and the American Experience," Berry points out that, as Americans, our country's background derives mainly from the historically Christian societies of Western Europe. This is true of American Catholics such as I, and it is also true of all Protestant Americans. Berry says of Western spirituality in general (pp. 113 ff.):

While the positive aspects of Western spirituality can be seen throughout the American experience, there are also the negative, alienating, and even destructive aspects of the same spiritual traditions. That traditional Western spiritualities have not enabled their followers to mitigate or even to understand or protest the terrifying assault of American society on the natural world is evidence of a certain incompetence or lack of understanding in these traditions.

Our inherited spiritual traditions, Berry says, are far from being totally to blame for our urge to plunder the environment without shame — but they are nonetheless "a pervasive force of great significance in understanding the total process."

Our Problematic Religious Traditions

What then are the aspects of our traditional religious belief systems that facilitate our carelessness about the living systems of the earth? Berry begins his answer by making this point:

When we inquire into the reasons for this inefficacy in our spiritual traditions, we might observe that our identification of the divine as transcendent to the natural world makes a direct human-divine covenant relationship possible, but also we negate the natural world as the locus for the meeting of the divine and the human. The natural world becomes less capable of communicating divine presence. This makes possible the conception of the natural world as merely external object.

This is a key point. From a Catholic Christian point of view, I have to recognize that Berry is largely right. Our religion tells us that we Catholics have (through the Catholic Church) a "direct line" to God in sacrament and prayer. On the other hand, we Catholics also have a highly sacramental view of the world, such that various physical or material objects or events can, in effect, "show" us God. We can see God within or behind these things or acts, not just above and beyond them.

Other Christians, however, are not so sacramentally oriented. Their "direct line" to God is a shorter one. For many of them, there is no church mediating between them and the divine — just Scripture. Nor are there sacraments in the Catholic sense of "visible signs of invisible grace." These Protestant Christians have historically had, at least compared with us Catholics, more to do with forming the spiritual orientation of the West as it pushed into the age where science, technology, and industry have ruled the day. For Protestant Christians especially, I have to think, the natural world has become "less capable of communicating divine presence."

Our Traditional Spiritual Covenant

Berry next moves on to a second aspect of traditional religious belief that has helped set the environment up for despoliation by us:

A further difficulty results from our insistence that the human is a spiritual being with an eternal destiny which is beyond that of other members of the created world. We were related to the divine by a special covenant. Our sense of being integral members of the earth community was severely weakened through both of these commitments. We thought that we were elevating the human when in reality we were alienating ourselves from the only context in which human life has any satisfying meaning.

That we humans alone have souls and that our soul will leave this earth to go to God when we die means, at its crassest, that we can leave behind us any amount of trash and spoilage when we go — in much the way that some people will leave a motel room in utter disarray when they check out.

Mind over Crass Matter

Berry's third unfortunate aspect of our traditional Western value system is a bit trickier to decode:

A third difficulty came later, when not only the divine and the human were taken away from intimate presence to the natural world, but also when the inner principle of life in natural beings was taken away in the Cartesian period. The concept of crass matter emerged as mere extension, capable only of externally manipulated and mechanistic activity. We entered onto a mechanistic phase in our thinking and in our basic norms of reality and value. If this has proved to be enormously effective in its short-term achievements, it has been disastrous in its long-term consequences.

The name of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596 - 1650) has the adjectival form "Cartesian." Cartesian philosophy is epitomized by the saying, "I think, therefore I am." Put another way, "My mind constitutes my whole true being." The implication is that my body is merely what my mind uses to allow it to mechanistically manipulate crass matter — in fact, that my body has no "inner principle of life" and is itself nothing but crass matter.

When Cartesian philosophy became dominant in the age of Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727), it set science up to become the handmaiden of a new "mechanistic phase" of human culture. Our "basic norms of reality and value" followed suit. With our "mind" wholly separated from all physical "matter," we felt free to exploit crass matter to the fullest in pursuit of our human imperatives.

Secular Borrowings from the Christian Tradition

Even though secularism and atheism have asserted themselves in Europe and in much of America in recent centuries, it is (to me, not to Berry) surprising the degree to which values that came originally from Christian beliefs have adapted themselves to the secularist-humanist scientific-industrial age that has been our cultural backdrop in the West for the last 400 years or so.

Berry describes our most prominent borrowed-from-Christian-tradition value this way:

Another significant factor in the American experience is found in the Christian doctrine of an infrahistorical millennial age of peace, justice, and abundance to be infallibly attained in the unfolding of the redemptive order. ... While the millennium was originally considered a spiritual condition to be brought about infallibly by divine providence, it was later interpreted simply as an age of human fulfillment to be brought about by human effort and human skill in exploiting the resources of the earth. ... When [the] millennial age did not appear by divine grace, the American people felt an obligation to raise it up by human effort.

The millennium is of course prophesied in the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Christian Bible. When the Lord returns to earth as Christ our King in what is called the Second Coming, he will rule over the planet for a thousand years — a millennium. Upon the earth in that period there will be perfect peace, ideal justice, and infinite joy.

Reach for a Secular "Millennium"

Berry is saying that in our secular striving to perfect the lot of humankind, we have tried by our own devices to produce just such a millennial "wonderworld." However, what we are actually doing is increasingly turning our planet into a despoiled "wasteworld."

At this point, I have to admit to some initial skepticism about that claim of Berry's, that a secularized "millennial vision of a blessed future" deserves a huge amount of the blame for having "left all present modes of existence in a degraded status." I at first questioned the putative millennium-oriented template that Berry says underlies his description of our initial situation in America:

All things were in an unholy condition. Everything needed to be transformed. This meant that anything unused was to be used if the very purpose of its existence was to be realized. Nothing in its natural state was acceptable.

The Compulsion To Use (Up)

That version of Berry's thesis failed to resonate with me. But the next thing he said exploded all my doubts:

This compulsion to use, to consume, has found its ultimate expression in our own times, when the ideal is to take the natural resources from the earth and transform them for consumption by a society that lives on ever-heightened rates of consumption. That consumption has something sacred about it is obvious from the central position it now occupies. This is all quite clear from the relentless advertising campaigns designed to convince the society that there is neither peace nor joy, neither salvation nor paradise, except through heightened consumption.

Yes! Amen! When Berry couches our secularist-millennial urge in terms of the glorification of individual consumption, rather than of the more abstract concept of industrial production, I begin to see the light.

That we are programmed to consume goods in a frenzied trance not unlike that of ecstatic worshippers in a Holiness church is, I think, shown by the recent Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving when stores slash prices in hopes that the sheer volume of sales will put their annual balance sheets in the black — when a shopper was trampled to death by rampaging hordes that had been waiting impatiently in the wee small hours for the door of an emporium to be unlocked. Everybody wanted to be the first in line to grab one or another of the quantities-limited "doorbuster" discounts. No one bothered to notice when somebody fell and was pummeled to death by their flying feet.

So when Berry asserts that, historically, "the ultimate basis of our ecological difficulties lay in our spirituality itself as it has come down to us through the centuries," I am all ears.

Berry's Rx for Our Spiritual Malaise

What, then, is the remedy? What can we do today to set aside what Berry calls the "dark aspects" of our own religious and spiritual traditions? What can lead us all into the ecological age?

Berry says our situation ...

... could be remedied only by a more intimate human association with the natural world in its evolutionary unfolding.

This is not just a matter of visiting unspoiled seashores and national parks on our vacation trips. That would surely be part of it, but unless we develop our awareness of the "evolutionary unfolding" of what we are immersing ourselves in — how it is also our evolutional unfolding as well — we're missing more than half the point. "Nature" isn't a thing to take snapshots of, it's a process to be witnessed in its eons-long evolution.

The Great Religious Traditions as Ongoing Processes

So, too, are the traditions of the "great classical religious civilizations" that formed our present age:

By definition any "tradition" is a process, not some established, contained, unchanging mode of believing, thinking, or acting. There is no definitive Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism, but only an identifiable Christian process, Hindu process, or Buddhist process. The historical reality is the reality of the tradition. (Emphasis added.)

We Christians need to guide the trajectory of our own tradition as it moves into the future alongside "a much more comprehensive change in human consciousness" — and here we find one of Berry's characteristic references to how we humans are uniquely able to ponder our own evolution — that is "brought about by the discovery of the evolutionary process." Berry continues:

Discovery of this unfolding process of the universe can be considered a moment of supreme significance not only for the human community, but also for the universe itself, especially in its expression on the earth as the only biospiritual planet we know.

"The primordial atomic particles," writes Berry in describing the first moments of time following the big bang, "held within themselves the destinies of all that has followed, including the spiritual shaping of the human" order into its present "psychic structure ... and spirituality." In other words, all that has ever happened, including the formation of who and what we are, is part of one single process of unfolding by and within the universe. We need now to deflect the course of our future theology to reflect on that fact.

The Importance of Tradition

Can't we just start with blank pages and write new theology books? Not if Berry is right and theological traditions are evolutionary processes that possess their own integrity over time. We have several such traditions in our human history: Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., and in the new age all of them must come together, says Berry, to form branches of the same tree of ecological wisdom, rooted in a common awareness of our new creation story.

Berry says the switch from our current age of plundering the natural environment to the needed new age of putting human affairs in integral touch with nature will come quite hard. We all wear opaque blinders about this, owing to what Berry refers to as our "cultural coding."

Cultural Coding

Cultural coding has to do with the way our scientific-industrial age has falsely programmed us to believe that the way in which our technology has "altered the planet in its physical structure and the biosphere in its most basic functioning" reflects some "sublime human-spiritual accomplishment" on our part.

That's because, writes Berry, "the negative side of our cultural determinations is generally hidden from consciousness. In this sense, the [present] culture depends on what might be called an altered state of consciousness, a trance state." As a result of this degenerative trance, we have sacrificed the "extraordinary sense of the divine" formerly visible within and behind the natural world.

A case in point, though Berry does not expressly mention it: most of us turn a blind eye to the practice of blowing the tops off mountains in the Appalachians so coal can be extracted and burned. Doing so produces, not just electricity, but also the acid rain that falls on the Appalachians, poisoning the teeming waterways and eating away at the survival of the mountains' extraordinarily rich flora and fauna. The more the Appalachians are thus brought low and denuded of life, the harder it becomes to locate "an extraordinary sense of the divine" in the higher places of our land.

Ending Our Degenerative Trance State

Our destructive trance state can end only when:

... we begin to recover a reverence for the material out of which we were born, for the nourishing context that sustains us, the sounds and scenery, the warmth of the wind and the coolness of the water — all of which delight us and purify us and communicate to us some sense of sacred presence.

We must, then, create the "cultural coding" of a new age, rooted in our new creation story. We need to "complete" the story as currently told to us by science by adding:

... the more integral account that includes the [numinousness] and consciousness dimensions of the emergent universe from its primordial moment.

Berry says we need, more than anything else, to tell the story of this "meaningful universe" in its entirety. Then the story will become what he calls a "functional cosmology" by means of which we can come to experience "as the primary mode of divine presence" nothing less than "the intercommunion of all the living and nonliving components of the universe."

Lessons of the Universe

If the universe itself is now to become our "primary educator," as Berry prognosticates, what will be its main lessons?

Berry says "the basic characteristics of the universe as manifested from the beginning" are these:

1. The unique and irreplaceable qualities of the individual
2. [Each being's] inseparable bonding with every other being in the universe

Each of us as an individual is "unique and irreplaceable"; yet each of us in inseparably entangled with "every other being in the universe." Our cultural coding has long taught us the first of these cosmic principles. The second is a bit harder to grasp. Berry puts it this way:

The interrelatedness of the universe in its every manifestation is what establishes the unity of the entire world and enables it to be a "universe." Every atomic particle is immediately present to every other atomic particle in a manner that enables us to say that the volume of each atom is the volume of the universe. 

Berry is referring to the gravitational attraction that all particles exert on all other particles, no matter how far apart they are in the universe. This attraction "which holds every being in its identity and its relatedness finds its fulfillment in the meeting of individuals in the world of the living and in the full expression of affection at the level of human consciousness." No gravity, accordingly, no love.

Another scientific insight that reveals what Berry calls "the sense of communion at the heart of reality" is one he does not address. It is the idea of "entanglement," one of the mysteries of quantum physics. An example of quantum entanglement is this: two electrons, introduced to one another so that they become "entangled," 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.

We live in a quantum universe in the sense that all energy is made up of massless quantum packets called photons, and the mass of all particles, Einstein showed, is condensed-yet-diffuse energy. It appears from the laws of quantum mechanics that the constituent quantum packets of which everything is made, including every one of us, are intrinsically bound together in untold cosmic skeins of entanglement.

Ergo, no entanglement, no cosmos. No cosmos, no love.

A Creation-Oriented Spirituality

If we, in our new ecological age, are to take all the above sufficiently into account, we will need to develop, says Berry, "a creation-oriented spirituality." Such a spirituality will be centered upon our new, culturally universal creation story, and as such will need to remedy our present Christian "overattachment to the salvific role" of our own spiritual tradition.

Berry is here referring to the way our Christian doctrine emphasizes its redemptive or salvific aspects, rather than highlighting the ongoing process of cosmic creation that our new spirituality must instead accentuate. We are told by our religious credo that our souls are saved by Christ's death on the cross, suggesting that when we die, our souls will depart this material world en route to heaven. We have grown way too attached, Berry believes, to that one notion. From its narrow, uncharitable perspective on the material world we presently live in, what difference does it make how big a mess we leave in our "motel room" when we go?

That can't reflect the real heart of our spiritual story, though. If we improvidently change "God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" into "God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was left spoiled and barren," then I think, right along with Berry, that we miss our true spirituality.