The Dream of the Earth, Part 5

Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)

Passionist priest-monk Thomas Berry, judging from his 1988 book The Dream of the Earth, parted company with much of the traditional belief system of the Catholic Church. In earlier posts in this ongoing series, I've laid out his thought regarding our need to embark upon a new, ecological age. Now I'd like to consider the question of whether Berry believed our current modes of religious and spiritual expression can be maintained in the new age.

In doing so, I'll be exploring his chapter "The New Story." This, chapter 10 in his book, is the first in which he pins down to any great extent why the religious modes we inherit today in our Christian West need to change.

Berry writes that during the late classical and early medieval periods, up until the middle 1300s, Western Europe told itself the religious story rooted in the Old and New Testaments. A primary part of the story consisted of the events of creation as told in the Book of Genesis. According to that story, all was going well in God's creation until

... the original harmony of the universe was broken by a primordial human fault [the Fall in the Garden of Eden], and that necessitated formation of a believing redemptive community that would take shape through the course of time. (p. 124)

That's the way the basic Genesis story was interpreted in that day. Berry tells of how this interpretation shaped our world:

Human history was [seen in that era as] moving infallibly toward its fulfillment in the peace of a reconstituted paradise. ... However severe the turbulent moments of history through the late classical and early medieval periods, these at least took place within a secure natural world ... (pp. 124 -125)

Death Comes Knocking at Europe's Door

From "The Dance of Death"
by Michael Wolgemut (1493)

In such a secure world, the "basic human or spiritual values" of medieval Europe were never in doubt. Then, beginning in 1347, Europe was devastated by the Black Death (see "The Dance of Death" at left). "It is estimated," Berry writes (p. 125), "that this plague ... had by 1349 killed off perhaps one-third of [Europe's] population. Almost half of the people of Florence died within a three-month period."

Meanwhile, though Berry doesn't mention it explicitly by name, the Hundred Years' War (1337 - 1453) was raging in France and England. Yet Berry alludes to "other social disturbances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries," and one imagines this state of near-constant warfare provoked many of them.

Terrible plagues continued to ravage the populace from time to time, for, Berry writes, "In London the last of the great plagues was [as late as] 1665." These devastating plagues and the concurrent social disturbances had two huge effects on our subsequent history.

The first was one that impelled a large part of Western thought and belief "toward a religious redemption out of the tragic world." Given that we as yet knew nothing about disease-causing microbes, there was "no explanation of the plague, other than divine judgment on a wicked world [and so] the answers most generally sought were in the moral and spiritual order, frequently outside the orthodox teachings of the church."

Faith Turns Fervent, Even Esoteric

There were two branches of this trend toward fervid faith. One of them took "recourse to supernatural forces, to the spirit world, to the renewal of esoteric traditions, and sometimes to pre-Christian beliefs and rituals that had been neglected in their deeper dynamics since the coming of Christianity." Here, one imagines, is the explanation for the rise of witchcraft and the occult arts in that time ... which in today's world are echoed in Wiccan and Neo-Pagan practices and in the rise of New Age religion in general.

The other branch of ardent spiritual commitment involved "an intensification of the faith experience" within traditional Christianity. This was:

... an effort to activate supernatural forces with special powers of intervention in the phenomenal world now viewed as threatening to the human community. The sense of human depravity increased. The need for an outpouring of influences from the higher numinous world was intensified. Faith dominated the religious experience. Redemption mystique became the overwhelming form of Christian experience. (p. 126)

An Rx for Terror: Secular Progress

The plagues and social disturbances of the late medieval period had that first large effect on Western history. There was a second. This one "led eventually to the scientific secular community of our times" as it "sought to remedy earthly terror not by supernatural or religious powers, but by understanding and controlling the earth process."

So, between 1620 and 1725, seminal scientific treatises by Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Giambattista Vico appeared. In that same era the telescope and microscope were invented. The mathematical field of calculus, "the supreme instrument of modern science" (p. 127), was discovered. And a new "scientific priesthood" sprang up as "the celestial bodies were scrutinized more intently, the phenomenon of light was examined, new ways of understanding energy evolved."

The new secularist bible proceeded to extend its hold over us. In 1859, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species explained the what and how of evolution, in response to the fact that:

... evidence was appearing in the realms of geology and paleontology indicating that there was a time sequence in the very formation of the earth and of all lifeforms upon the earth. The earth was not the eternal, fixed, abiding reality that it had been thought to be. It suddenly dawned upon Western consciousness that earlier lifeforms were of a simpler nature than later lifeforms, that the later forms were derived from the earlier forms. The complex of life manifestations had not existed from the beginning by some external divine creative act setting all things in their place. The earth in all its parts, especially in its lifeforms, was in a state of continuing transformation. (pp. 127-128)

Next, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, came much experimental work leading to the physical theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. These were the twin advances in physics by which humankind developed a fuller understanding of "the infra-atomic world and the entire galactic system" (p. 128).

The Earth as "It," Not "Thou"

In the wake of the Black Death, then, came two historical movements in the West. One began as an attempt to break the hold exerted over our souls by erstwhile human attempts at prayerful harmony with a fickle, faithless world. The other began as an attempt to use science and technology to fix a broken, treacherous world. Both movements deprecated the value of the physical earth per se. The earth — Mother Nature — was seen not as "Thou," but as "It." "It" needed to be transcended or else "It" needed to be mended ... but "It" was to be viewed no longer as a splendid revelation of glorious divinity.

"Thou" and "It" are terms I borrow from Martin Buber's I and Thou, a book which posits that when we treat a "Thou" such as you or me not as a person having subjective inner experiences but as a utilitarian thing or object to be exploited and tosses aside — as an "It" — we commit the ultimate atrocity.

Berry teaches us the same thing not just about one another but about the whole earth, with all its living and nonliving forms ... and indeed about the entire universe.

That seems at first to be incomprehensible, no? How can we say that the earth, much less the universe, has consciousness and subjectivity, the way we have? Berry's answer is that we are, in effect, the universe's subjective, conscious, self-aware eyes and ears. The unfolding evolution of the universe made life on Earth, then made us as Earth's only conscious lifeforms. We are inseparable from the process that made us and sustains us. If we are sentient, so too is the process that generated us.

Telling Ourselves the "New Story"

"The New Story" — Berry's chapter title — is the story of the unfolding evolution of the universe that made us. Berry tells the story this way:

The story of the universe is the story of the emergence of a galactic system in which each new level of expression emerges through the urgency of self-transcendence. Hydrogen in the presence of some millions of degrees of heat emerges into helium. After the stars take shape as oceans of fire in the heavens, they go through a sequence of transformations. Some eventually explode into the stardust out of which the solar system and the earth take shape. Earth gives unique expression of itself in its rock and crystalline structures and in the variety and splendor of living forms, until humans appear at the moment in which the unfolding universe becomes conscious of itself. The human emerges not only as an earthling, but as a worldling. We bear the universe in our beings as the universe bears us in its being. The two have a total presence to each other and to that deeper mystery out of which the universe and ourselves have emerged. (p. 132)


Told that way, the story is one which resents all attempts to drive a wedge between us and the natural order from which we emerged. Yet that is exactly what the "believing redemption community" today does, whenever it rejects evolution science. In doing that, Berry shows, the anti-Darwin portion of the faith community is heir to the large skein of Western thought and belief that in the wake of the Black Death in the fourteenth century moved "toward a religious redemption out of the tragic world."

The new story we can tell today likewise resents attempts to drive a wedge between us and "that deeper mystery out of which the universe and ourselves have emerged." Yet that is exactly what many scientists have done in their "wish to experience the real in its tangible, opaque, material aspect" and in their "demand for objectivity and the quantitative aspect of the real" (p. 133). Science has in the recent past preferred to play down what it now, according to Berry, can no longer ignore: "a growing awareness of the integral physical-psychic dimension of reality."

An Integral View of Reality

Berry feels that science is already moving toward such an "integral" view of reality. The question is whether the "believing redemption community" — including us Catholics, among others — is doing likewise. In the main, I believe Berry's answer to that query is no.

He is, however, gentle in his chiding of religious faith for its resistance:

The believing redemption community is awakening only slowly to this new context of understanding. There is a fear, a distrust, even a profound aversion, to the natural world and its processes. It would be difficult to find a theological seminary in this country that has an adequate program on creation as it is experienced in these times. The theological curriculum is dominated by a long list of courses on redemption and how it functions in aiding humans to transcend the world, all based on biblical texts. Such a situation cannot long endure, however, since a new sense of the earth and its revelatory import is arising in the believing community. (pp. 133 - 134)

What About Values?

"Revelatory import" in the abstract is one thing. What about the question of "where the values are" (p. 133) in all this? How are the values we live by to be derived, and how are they to be transmitted to succeeding generations? In a passage that I, as a Catholic, especially relate to, Berry says:

In transmitting values through the sequence of generations, we no longer have the initiation techniques whereby the vision and values of earlier generations were transmitted to succeeding generations. Yet there is an abiding need to assist succeeding generations to fulfill their proper role in the ongoing adventure of the earth process. In the human realm education must supply what instinct supplies in the prehuman world. There is need for a program to aid the young to identify themselves in the comprehensive dimensions of space and time. This was easier in the [classical] world of [Plato's] the Timaeus, where the earth was seen as an [unchanging] image of the eternal Logos. In such a world Saint Thomas [Aquinas] could compose his masterful presentation of Christian thought, and the place and role of the human within that context. This could then be summarized in catechetical form and taught to succeeding generations. (pp. 135 - 136)

Clearly, Berry thinks it is no longer valid just to catechize our young as to the supposedly timeless wisdom of Thomas Aquinas about a supposedly static universe. Sorry, my fellow Catholics, but (as Berry writes) this "later, more philosophical mode of Christian explanation provided in our theologies" will no longer do. (He is talking here about the philosophy-heavy theological understanding which supplanted what was originally a more narrative-based and direct relationship with Christ as the Christian centuries wore on.)

Instead, we today need "a new way of understanding values":

We are returning to a more traditional context of story as our source of understanding and value. ... It is of utmost importance that succeeding generations become aware of the larger story outlined here and the numinous, sacred values that have been present in an expanding sequence over the entire time of the world's existence. Within this context all our human affairs — all professions, occupations, and activities — have their meaning precisely insofar as the enhance the emerging world of subjective intercommunion within the total range of reality. (p. 136)

Following Our Bliss

So, in broad outline, what are these "numinous, sacred values"? What do we need to be doing, here in this unfolding universe of ours today? Berry answers that the most important thing of all is to articulate our own inner reality:

Interior articulation of its own reality is the immediate responsibility of every being. Every being has its own interior, its self, its mystery, its numinous aspect. (p. 135)

The guru of myth Joseph Campbell put this same insight more succinctly: "Follow your bliss." Berry goes on:

To deprive any being of this sacred quality is to disrupt the larger order of the universe. Reverence will be total or it will not be at all. The universe does not come to us in pieces any more than a human individual stands before us with some part of its being. ... Here we come to the further realization that the universe is coherent within itself throughout the total extent of space and the entire sequence of its time development. This web of relationships throughout the universe is what first impinges on our waking consciousness. It is this deepening association within the universe that enables life to emerge into being. The living form is more individuated, with greater subjectivity and more intensive identity within itself and with its environment. All these factors are multiplied on a new scale of magnitude in the realm of consciousness. There a supreme mode of communion exists within the individual, with the human community, within the earth-human complex.

Then come these especially beautiful words:

Increased capacity for personal identity is inseparable from this capacity for mutual presence. Together this distance and this intimacy establish the basic norms of being, of life, of value.

Amen to that!