The Dream of the Earth, Part 7

"Earth Dreaming"

In the six installments of this series thus far, I set forth several major themes that Passionist priest-monk Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009) fed into his seminal 1988 book The Dream of the Earth. In the book, Berry prophesies that we must, and will, revive our ability to sense a divine presence in and through nature, rather than encounter God outside and above nature — a God who redeems us away from nature and out of this physical world.

We need to do that mainly because our industrial-technological-commercial activity is destroying huge numbers of life forms and habitats on this planet. When we exert our industrial might, we harm the earth from which we have sprung. We can't go on doing that without violating the basic order of things and harming our own selves in the long run.

We on this planet, Berry says, are the culmination of a cosmic evolutionary process that has produced a unique species, us, who can contemplate that very evolutionary process, and in doing so sense the divine source behind the process. Berry's book can be considered a theological treatise: he sees divinity as the hidden-yet-discernible source behind all cosmic history.

Out-of-This-World Piety

This is not exactly standard Catholic theology. Nor is it standard Christian doctrine, taking into account that of Protestants as well as Catholics. In fact, throughout his book Berry carefully avoids using the word "God" as a synonym for divinity.

He likewise avoids talking about the Catholic-Protestant divide, speaking instead, when necessary, of the "religious troubles of the sixteenth century." His intent is to show that all of Christian doctrine, starting from a time earlier than the Protestant Reformation, had become terribly distorted, causing Western Christendom to lose its one-time ability to see the divine behind, and through, nature.

What distorted the doctrine? The first cause Berry cites was the upshot of the Black Death, a virulent outbreak of deathly plague that vastly shrank the population of Europe over a few short years in the mid-fourteenth century. Many of the plague's survivors developed an out-of-this-world piety that expunged the once-sacred image of the natural world.

If the material world could go so haywire as to breed such inexplicable agony and death, people came to believe, then obviously God's redemption must go first to those who reject Mother Nature, rather than to those who embrace and cherish her.

Patriarchal Indo-European Culture

Yet there is an older, larger cause of the appalling distortion of our relationship with nature, says Berry. As long as 5,000 years ago the settled, agrarian populace of Europe came under attack by warlike nomadic tribes from the north and east. The nomadic attackers were the peoples we know as Indo-Europeans or Aryans:

Indo-European Expansion
between 3000 and 2000 B.C.

The Indo-European invaders lionized male deities, while the settled peoples of Europe worshipped goddesses. The conquerors imposed their patriarchal paradigm and male-dominant worship practices on the Neolithic Age which immediately began in Europe. We today are heirs to the Neolithic Revolution.

Patriarchal Semitic Culture

Though Berry does not mention it, I know from other sources — primarily The Power of Myth, by the late guru of myth Joseph Campbell, in collaboration with journalist Bill Moyers — that similarly patriarchal tribes emerged from the Arabian peninsula at about the same time in history and conquered the settled peoples to their north who were living in what we today refer to as the "fertile crescent":

The Fertile Crescent

This was an area that spawned many of our earliest civilizations. The conquering tribes from the south were the original Semites. One of the tribes, for example, were the Akkadians. Under King Sargon the Great (2334-2279 B.C.) and his successors, the Akkadians extended their empire to include the land of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, at the eastern end of the fertile crescent. According to Wikipedia, "During the 3rd millennium B.C., there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium B.C. ..."

According to Joseph Campbell, these historical events corresponded with the superimposition of Semitic male deities upon what Thomas Berry would call a "matricentric" culture. (Abraham, the originator of what became today's Judeo-Christian worldview, was of Semitic descent.) So, again, a settled matriarchal culture found superimposed upon it a male-dominant, patriarchal worldview.

It was this male-dominant worldview which produced the many wonders of what we call civilization, but which has at the same time come to despoil the earth.

We as Heirs to Ancient Patriarchies

We today are the heirs of those same ancient patriarchies, a heritage that has come to us down through the times of the ancient empires; then through the world of the ancient Hebrews who first worshipped Yahweh; then through more recent ecclesiastical institutions such as the Catholic Church; through secular nation-states such as the United States and the many nations of Europe and of today's larger world; and finally through the environmental depredations of today's corporate enterprises. All these institutions have been controlled primarily by males of our species.

The net result has been twofold. One, we today worship a deity who originated in the Near East and whom we traditionally identify as male; goddess worship is seen as pagan. Two, we believe our male God exhorts us to subdue and exert dominion over the earth, using it at will for our own God-given purposes. In this worldview, it is perfectly in tune with all that is holy for us to use nature up, if so doing gratifies legitimate human aspirations. If our attitude toward nature redounds to the detriment of the rest of the living world, fine.

Our Own Patriarchal Culture

Our culture is accordingly patricentric and patriarchal. No wonder, Berry says, that we abuse the earth with seeming impunity; patriarchal culture is intrinsically controlling and domineering. What doesn't immediately fall into step with its male-centered prerogatives must be conquered and subdued by force if need be.

Berry says that if we want to stop abusing the earth, we need to move radically away from patriarchal ideas. But how would that be possible?

There are several sources of hope. One of them is the fact that, says Berry, "the heritage of the earlier matricentric phase [of human prehistory] has continued as an undercurrent within Western cultural traditions" as we are heirs to them.

"Matricentric ways of thinking and their associated rituals," Berry continues, "seem to be among the component elements of our submerged cultural traditions. They carry on an earlier wisdom associated with alchemy, astrology, the pagan nature rituals, and the hermetic teachings."

Memes and Our Cultural DNA

An analogy comes from the idea of what I'll call "cultural DNA." We know that real DNA, the stuff of the genes in the cells of our bodies, evolved over millions of years, à la Darwin's theory of evolution. In his book The Selfish Gene, biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" to represent something similar to the gene, but an intangible thing that establishes and propagates itself not within biological species but within human cultures.

A "meme" is, says Wikipedia, "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. While genes transmit biological information, memes ... transmit ideas and belief information."

The idea of a "meme" is
itself a meme.

So we humans possess a "cultural DNA" made up of memes that replicate as they spread from person to person within a culture.

Accordingly, if we indeed have "submerged cultural traditions" that originated thousands of years ago and, being matricentric, once connected us existentially to the living earth, surely they may be capable of becoming real once again to us as living memes.

Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

There is another source of hope for moving radically away from patriarchal culture and its attendant despoliation of the earth: archetypes that live in our collective unconscious.

We humans are the only species that use symbols. In the unconscious part of our psyche, there are many patterns or templates for the symbols that we make. These are the archetypes, and every human is born with the same set of archetypal templates in the unconscious depths of his or her psyche.

The "Mother" Archetype

Representation
of the "mother"
archetype

When we are born — and throughout our lives — each of us possesses an archetype for "mother." This archetype draws the physical energies of a newborn's body into the baby's psyche, as rudimentary as that psyche still is. The psyche then sees the baby's own physical mother in the light of its inborn template, its archetype for "mother." So Baby just knows to expect nurturance and nutrition from Mother.

In other words, its actual mother "symbolizes" nurturance and nutrition to the baby, by virtue of its possessing an inborn "mother" archetype.

The same "mother" archetype likewise expresses itself in symbolic form when we Catholics revere and pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary also symbolically represents a separate archetype from that for "mother": that for "virgin," with all its religious associations in our culture and in many other religious cultures of the world.

Archetypes are powerful. Combine "mother" with "virgin" and then add in the archetype for "God," and you have a potent psychological reason why we Catholics so adore the Virgin Mary, the Blessed Mother of God.

Mother Earth as "Good Mother" and "Bad Mother"

Hindu goddess Kali
as "bad mother"

There is, in addition to the nurturing "good mother" archetype, another "mother" archetype that is symbolized as devouring and destroying. This is the "bad mother."

Key to understanding how the notion of archetypes fits so well with the thought of Thomas Berry is the idea that the earth is both the "good mother" who nourishes us and the "bad mother" who will devour and destroy us if we keep on eradicating the other life forms she has given birth to.

"Good" and "bad" are, of course, relative to our prejudices and aspirations. Mother Earth has, after all, slain many of her species-children, often in mass extinctions. The dinosaurs perished 65 million years ago, as tiny mammals who were our lineal ancestors got a toehold on the future. The eventual result was us.

For this reason, the archetype of the "Great Mother" subsumes both the "good mother" and the "bad mother." In his book, Berry makes no bones about the fact that nature is terrible as well as magnificent. "Mother Nature" is accordingly a fit image of the "Great Mother" archetype in all its aspects.

Hope for the Future

Submerged memes that were once associated with earlier, matricentric cultures, taken along with universal human archetypes such as the "Great Mother," offer hope that we can indeed shift gears into a less patriarchal, more ecological age.

However, we need to understand how traditional Catholic perspectives can and must evolve. For example, instead of investing our inborn "mother" archetype exclusively in the "good mother" image offered to us by the Blessed Mother of God, we may need to come to terms with the "bad," death-dealing side of Mother Earth as well. This "Great Mother," in her grand entirety, may need to become the maternal figure we see as our window onto divinity.