The Dream of the Earth, Part 8

Thomas Berry
(1914 - 2009)

This is the eighth installment in my series about Thomas Berry's The Dream of the Earth, a seminal book by the Passionist priest-monk whose 1988 warning about humankind's need to get back in harmony with the natural world or face dire consequences is even more resonant today. As global warming threatens to ruin much of what we and Mother Nature have so patiently built, we need to pay heed.

As I suggested in the last installment, our Catholic religious beliefs will need to evolve if we are all to get back in sync with nature. Why? Because our Catholic beliefs represent the original attitudes of Western Christianity, and Western Christianity has deep anti-nature roots.

The Roots of Our Belief System

Berry talks about these roots over and over in his book, saying there are historically two branches to the spreading root system. One branch concerns a change in Christian piety during the fourteenth century. In the wake of the Black Death, our thoughts became focused on our redemption "out of nature": our eternal life was seen, from that point of view, as transpiring in a celestial heaven beyond the physical sky. This world became but a way station to our promised paradise.

In the other branch of the root system, many of us discerned the (seeming, not actual) possibility of "perfecting" nature by virtue of our own science, engineering, and industry. If we could bring our human powers sufficiently to bear, then at some foundational level we came to think that we ourselves could bring about the millennium, the 1,000-year reign of Christ on earth that is foretold in the book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible.

Overarching those two historical trends, says Berry, is one that began some 5,000 years ago, as invaders conquered settled agrarian people in the Middle East and Europe. This was a spark that set alight the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic culture in the Old World. The conquering invaders brought with them their religious devotion to gods, rather than goddesses; the conquered agrarian peoples had practiced goddess worship. Patriarchal or male-centered attitudes have been dominant in our culture ever since, and those attitudes — which instinctively seek dominion rather than harmony, conquest rather than unity — have set today's culture up for a constant plundering of nature.

Older "Matricentric" Roots

But, as I said in the last post, there has lingered in our mindset a substratum of ideas that derive from the earlier, matricentric cultures that the Indo-Europeans (a.k.a. Aryans) superimposed their ways on. Berry says we need to resurrect these ideas now.

To do that, I suggested in that post, we need to look to certain archetypes present latently in all human minds. Though these inborn, hidden patterns of the psyche are initially present to us unconsciously, we encounter them indirectly in symbols that crop up repeatedly in our dreams as wells as in religious images the world over.

Jung's Archetypes of Femininity and Wholeness

C. G. Jung (1875 - 1961)

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung taught that archetypes power religious beliefs. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, wrote Jung, was prompted by a universal archetype according to which the number three represents "perfection."

As such, Jung said, it fails today to represent "wholeness." A fourth member would have to be added to that tripartite symbol for it to do that. The Trinity would need to be amplified into a quaternity.

A step in that direction, Jung held, was taken with the promulgation of the doctrine of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. That was a positive step, because the "fourth member" would necessarily have to be feminine — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost being masculine.

Ever since the time of Adam and Eve, femininity has been symbolically linked with the earth and the physical world. Eve is blamed for the Fall of Man, and the result is that the entire material world, no longer that original Eden, has been deemed fallen, corrupt, and under the sway of the Devil as "the prince of this world." Though Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, is held to be without the stain of Original Sin, nevertheless her bodily assumption, in Jung's view, represents a symbolic foot in the door for importing all of material reality into the divine scheme.