Theology of Catholic Environmentalism, Part 3

In parts 1 and 2 of this Theology of Catholic Environmentalism series, I've challenged the claim made by Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum that President Obama's environ­mental policies stem from a "phony theology," one that amounts to a "worldview that elevates the Earth above man." Instead, I show that the teachings and theology of the Catholic Church — Santorum is a Catholic, as am I, though President Obama is not — form a sound basis for environmental concern.

The late Pope John Paul II was considered a conservative in his approach to Catholic teachings. Yet his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus abhors "the senseless destruction of the natural environment" and the fact that man "can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray." I take this as prime evidence that environmentalism can be entirely consistent with conservative Catholic faith.

What has become of our (in John Paul II's words from the encyclical) "wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them"? One answer to that question lies at the heart of the argument made by the Thomas Berry, an ordained Passionist monk who died at age 94 in 2009, in such books as The Dream of the Earth. I have talked at length about this book by Berry in my The Dream of the Earth series of posts. Herein I'll look at the roots of Berry's thought in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, written 1265–1274.

Berry writes:

This [awareness that the present economic system is too devastating to the natural fruitfulness of the earth to long supply human needs] is not a socialism on the national scale, nor is it an international socialism, it is a planetary socialism. It is a socialism based on the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas, wherein he deals with the diversity of creatures. Beyond planetary socialism he proposes an ultimate universal socialism where he says that because the divine goodness "could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, he produced many and diverse creatures, and what was wanting in one in the representation of divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever." (p. 79)

Berry is referring to the question "Whether the multitude and distinction of things come from God?" that Aquinas takes up, in the First Part of his Summa, in the context of "Question 47. The distinction of things in general." Given that we believe that God is One, how can we reconcile with this belief the idea that the One God created the world (see Genesis chapter 1) as a "multitude and distinction of things"? Add to this the notion that He made one world, not many, and that within this world not all things are created equal and are found to exist across a variable range of "goodness," and you get a theological puzzle.

St. Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274)

Aquinas shows in this regard that "the universe would not be perfect if only one grade of goodness were found in things." That is, it is not only possible but necessary for there to be distinctions of goodness in the creation made by God to reflect His perfect goodness. Only in that way, as Berry says, could "that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness [in the created world] might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided and hence the whole universe together participates the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever."

What, then, is "goodness"? It is whatever points toward the Supreme Good, i.e., God. To St. Thomas Aquinas, according to this discussion of the "good" in The Catholic Encyclopedia — see under "Scholastic Doctrine" — "God, the Supreme Being and the source of all other being is consequently the Supreme Good, and the goodness of creatures results from the diffusion of His goodness." The profusion of living creatures and of nonliving creations — our world's manifest diversity — reflects the "diffusion" of our Creator God's fundamental goodness into this world.

Today's Catholic theology is anchored in that of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Pope Pius V in 1567 proclaimed a Doctor of the Church. So it is not only acceptable but entirely appropriate for Catholics to honor creation in its entirety — the "less good" creatures as well as the greater — even in the face of accusations of "elevating the Earth above man."

The Dream of the Earth, Part 10

What if we modern Judeo-Christians — Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or even fallen away/atheist — have inherited a mindset that disposes us to deprecate and even to steal from Mother Nature?

And what if we don't even know that we have that mindset, because it seems so "natural" to us that we can't imagine any other? That's the situation described by the late Passionist priest-monk Thomas Berry in his landmark 1988 book The Dream of the Earth.

C. G. Jung
(1875 - 1961)

In my previous nine posts in this series about Berry's book, I've talked about Berry's ideas and introduced parallel ideas from Carl Gustav Jung (pictured at left), the psychoanalyst who in the first half of the last century developed an understanding of the human psyche which gives a deeper explanation of why our nature-deprecating mindset exists.

First of all, we need to keep in mind that modern people disagree among themselves. Some, as religious people, emphasize matters of the spirit, and that emphasis makes physical nature a "second-class citizen" of the material world, often imagined as fallen, even corrupt.

Others of us, those who are secularists, believe more in science than religion. Secularists would rather concentrate on the material world than on matters of the spirit.

Engineering the Earth?

Sadly, much secularist thought accords with a centuries-long tradition of trying to manage nature and make changes to how it functions. Berry contends trying to engineer the earth to suit our human aspirations makes ours a "wasteworld," not a "wonderworld." It doesn't work. It can't work.

On the other hand, those who are still religious in their outlook seem to have little spiritual connection to the earth. They and the secularists disagree about the existence of God, but they oddly agree quite well about not seeing nature in sacramental terms.

So why the secularist/spiritual split, anyway?

One reason for the secularist/spiritual split in the modern world, says Jung, is that the modern, Western, scientific attitude has lost its former connection to the contents of the unconscious archetypes that are shared by all humankind. For its part, Western Christianity has likewise lost its connection to the foundational archetypes.

Disconnection from Our Archetypal Roots

Any archetype — an "archetype "is a template which exists in what Jung called the "collective unconscious" and belongs accordingly to all humanity — is something we are normally unaware of. Yet archetypes govern all of the images and symbols we dream up. Jung said Christ, in particular, symbolizes the supreme archetype that he called the "Self."

The Self, Jung said, is the image of God within the soul, and its wide variety of external images include mandalas ...

... and depictions of Christ on the Cross:

The Self Archetype as a Symbol of Wholeness

The Self represents completeness or wholeness. That may sound as if it likewise ought to represent spiritual perfection, but Jung said it does so only with a crucial qualification.

If the Self archetype hidden in the depths of the unconscious shows forth as images of perfection rather than of wholeness, it must do so by first splitting in two. One of the two halves of the Self has to be "good," the other "evil." The good half is what then manifests as images or symbols of perfection.

This, in fact, is what Jung said has happened in Christian history. Right from the start, Christian belief "constellated" — activated, ushered forth from the unconscious — the good side of the Self in ways that insisted that Christ himself had no evil side, no "shadow." Christ was without sin. So, too, should we be.

Two Halves of the Self

"Splitting" created a tension between the two halves of the Self, only one of which represents the spiritual or "good" side of the human personality.

The "good" side of the Self became present to our consciousness in response to the advent of what Jung called the "Christ-symbol." The Christ-symbol is the way in which the crucified/risen/ascended Christ was viewed by his first devotees in the early church. Jung said that the Christ-symbol "constellated" for us the "good" half of our Self archetype.

The other half of the split Self is the animal or "evil" half that we each also possess, and it was pushed further into our unconscious realm by the advent of the Christ-symbol.

Owing to the Myth of the Fall — the Genesis story of how a serpent convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden — nature came to be seen as fallen and corrupt. As human beings, our "animal nature" was seen as prey to evil. Our dark, animal side is what the repressed, "evil" half of Jung's Self archetype represents; the good, now-conscious half of the Self can be thought of as, for Christians in particular, a psychic prototype that, when constellated, manifests the all-good, all-light, all-spiritual side of our nature.

Inheriting such a view of ourselves and our world, is it any wonder that we Christians today so often deprecate and even fear Mother Nature? We religiously resist the caged-in-the-unconscious animal side of our Self because in the days 2,000 years ago when our church was established, it made fine spiritual sense so to do.

The Dream of the Earth, Part 9

C. G. Jung
(1875 - 1961)

In previous installments in my series about Thomas Berry's book The Dream of the Earth, I've told of the late Passionist priest-monk's vision of a new kind of human progress that does not plunder the riches of nature.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung ("YOONG") had a like vision of progress, but for Jung the goal was not so much environmental harmony as the human person's psychological and spiritual growth. Jung put Christianity "on the psychoanalyst's couch" and investigated what ailed the religion. He hoped to cure what he called the church's "one-sidedness."

Berry, for his part, agreed that Western Christianity had deep anti-nature roots: for instance, during the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when Europe's population shrank by one third, the ensuing outburst of pious fervor emphasized a notion of redemption that left behind corrupt, untrustworthy physical nature.

Berry also noted that at the dawn of Europe's Neolithic Age some 5,000 years ago, male-led nomadic tribes — the Indo-Europeans/Aryans — conquered the settled agrarian peoples living in Europe then, who worshipped goddesses over gods. The Aryans' patriarchal, conquest-oriented worldview has, in Berry's view, come down to us today and blinded us to the legitimate claims Mother Nature makes on us, her (seeming) conquerors.

"Good" vs. "Evil"

Jung said the church was "one-sided" because it had long set up the opposition between "good" and "evil" as an absolute split which could under no circumstances be bridged. But, Jung said, much of what was deemed "evil" was actually an expression of inborn aspects of the human psyche. If men do evil, Doctor Jung's prescription was for individuals as well as society-at-large to bring our more unsavory drives out of the "shadow" of unacceptable inclinations that lurk within the unconscious psyche. In that way, the more "wicked" aspects of our nature could be balanced out by our sweeter side.

Jung's Archetypes

Our drives — all of them, bad or good — are associated with archetypes, Jung held. These archetypes are unconscious patterns or templates from which symbolic representations emerge in dreams, poetry, and religious images. For example, we Catholics see Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, as symbolic of purity and of holy acquiescence to God's will. Jung said Mary reflects our inborn archetype for motherhood, that for virginal purity, and that representing the nature of God himself. We couldn't as a community understand Mary if we didn't share archetypes in our collective unconscious that predispose us to that understanding.

But some of our inborn archetypes under certain circumstances dispose us to do what our church and our culture deem unsavory, antisocial things. These, like all archetypes, form so-called "complexes" that usually get hidden in the "shadow" that is hidden in our unconscious depths. From that hidden staging area they can "inflate" into the conscious realm and provoke truly evil behavior. This was Jung's view of how the evils associated with National Socialism in Hitler's Germany came about.

Berry and Jung: Overlapping Ideas

Thomas Berry was environmentally oriented, while C.G. Jung emphasized the human psyche, yet the thought of the two men overlapped. Murray Stein, in Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, gives clues as to how and why.

Stein says Jung studied the writings of the earlier Western alchemists. He did so as a way of studying "Christianity's unconscious." In order to gain clues to what in the conscious teaching of the Christian church is incomplete with respect to our full set of unconscious archetypes, Jung held that "the images of alchemy reveal the [unconscious] compensatory reaction toward" —  and thereby limn what is one-sided and incomplete about — the church's "dominant attitude" (p. 144).

Jung and Alchemy

Alchemy was an ancient tradition the primary aim of which was the creation of the mythical "philosopher's stone," said to be capable of turning base metals into gold or silver and also of acting as an elixir of life that would confer youth and immortality upon its user. Alchemical attempts to create the philosopher's stone were precursors to modern experiments in chemistry.

Stein says about Jung's interest in alchemy:

Alchemy developed images, for example, that indicated [to Jung] the reaction of the unconscious, [in the guise of] the "chthonic feminine," to the historical (pre-Christian) cultural shift toward masculine domination. With the constellation of the father-son dominant first in classical [i.e., pagan Greek and Roman] and then in Christian culture, there was a simultaneous repression of the mother-daughter pattern of earlier matriarchal consciousness.

Jung held that ideas and images in the psyche tend to gather around one central idea, forming a complex. The "mother" archetype is typically the nuclear idea of a complex of notions elaborating the various facets of mother symbolism. Likewise, "father," "son," and "daughter" tend to become archetypal focal points. Complexes can have a single archetypal nucleus; otherwise, two (or more) archetypes together, such as "father/son" or "mother/daughter," can serve to tie together numerous ideas and images into one single complex pattern.

The "Chthonic Feminine"

Jung's "chthonic feminine" refers to the fact that symbolically, the fertile material we call "earth" (gardeners know what I'm talking about) is thought of as feminine. In particular, the "interior" of the soil (which is referred to as "chthonic," a word which is pronounced THON-ic but with an optional hard-K sound at the beginning, based on an etymological root from the ancient Greek) is thought of as female. Cults in ancient Greece made living sacrifices to the deities of the earth that were associated with its renewable fertility.

So Jung echoes Thomas Berry in nodding toward what Murray Stein calls "the historical (pre-Christian) cultural shift toward masculine domination." Both Jung and Berry felt that our ostensibly male God stems from such a pre-Christian cultural shift away from matricentric, mother-centered emphases.

I would add that there was a like shift in the fertile crescent, in the land where monotheism was born, but the bringers of patriarchal attitudes to that region of the Middle East were not Aryans from the north and east but Semites from the Arabian Peninsula. A common emphasis on patriarchy, though, is (so I am guessing) why the Judaic religion of the ancient Hebrews, inflected through Christianity, could be successfully transplanted to once-Aryan Europe at the outset of the Middle Ages.

The "Mother-Son" Constellation

Reading further in Stein's discussion, one finds hope that the "dominant attitude of Christian consciousness" which extols the male "father-son" image alone can indeed be bridged to the alchemists' cherished "mother-son" image. These two images, "never joined in a single myth or symbol," have been constellated dually in human culture, Stein writes. ("Constellated" means that the unconscious archetype or complex has manifested itself in a particular way in the outer world.) The "father-son" constellation appeared in official church doctrine, the "mother-son" constellation in alchemical treatises.

The second "son," the one that is part of the alchemists' "mother-son" image, has been called the filius philosophorum, "the philosophers' child." His mother is called the prima materia, the "primordial mother." In the alchemical view, this second son bestows redemption on the world as a whole, including physical matter. He is the filius macrocosmi, the "macrocosmic son." The first son, Jesus Christ, is the filius microcosmi, the son who redeems just "man the microcosm" but not the rest of the material world — just the spiritual aspect of man is saved, according to Christian belief.

In other words, the second or "lower" son completes the work of the first or "upper" son in redeeming the entire world.

The "Dual Constellation" of the First and Second Sons

This analysis by Jung is hopeful indeed. Jung's earlier analysis of Trinitarian symbology held that the symbol of the second son was originally represented as the Devil(!), i.e., Christ's archenemy, the Antichrist. Now, Stein says, we encounter two sons whose ...

... dual constellation, the one from the father's world reaching downward in the incarnation [of Jesus Christ], the other from the mother's world reaching upward in the symbolism and work of alchemy, represent an attempt to bridge the gulf [between the two sons] that had deepened during earlier millennia.

Unlike the Devil, the second son, extolled by the alchemists, "was not intransigently hostile to the upper son of God." Though "clearly the son of the rejected primordial mother ... his benign attitude toward the Christian son represents," in Jung's words ...

... a sign that the chthonic underworld, having been rejected by the spirit [as understood by Christianity] and identified with evil, has the tendency to compromise. There is no mistaking the fact that he is a concession to the spiritual and masculine principle, even though he carries in himself the weight of the earth and the whole fabulous nature of primordial animality.

A Hopeful Answer from the "Mother-World"

Jung went on to say that image of the second, or lower, son, as "an answer from the mother-world," "shows that the gulf between it and the father-world is not unbridgeable."

That's good, I think, because only if the gulf can be bridged can Berry's prophecy of an incipient "ecological age" on earth come true.

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.

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.

The Dream of the Earth, Part 6

Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)

The late Passionist monk and priest Thomas Berry parts company with some of the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church in his 1988 book The Dream of the Earth. He charges our traditional belief system with being too oriented toward the soul's redemption "out of" — away from — this created world. Now, in view of the several environmental crises which humankind faces, he says we need to be more earth-aware and creation-centric.

This is the sixth installment of my ongoing series about his book. In it, I'll discuss his chapter 12, "Patriarchy: A New Interpretation of History." As you can tell from the title of the chapter, its subject is one that will stick in the craw of many Catholics, as our church is one of the more patriarchal institutions on the face of the earth.

First, a brief recap of my earlier posts. Berry's book is about the need for our society to move from the current industrial-technological-consumerist age into a new "ecological age." We need to do this because we are turning our planet slowly but surely into a toxic trash heap. We are destroying the earth's rainforests and other forested land, exhausting or destroying the topsoil we grow food on, poisoning the water we drink, and polluting the air we breathe. In doing all these things as the supposed means of satisfying human aspirations — most of which are bogus needs created entirely by the ceaseless stimulus of constant advertising — we are killing countless living species along with the complex ecosystems they live in.

In this collection of essays that can stand alone or be read as a group, Berry lays out what he considers the most significant facets in the history of Western Christian thought. The Western view of the world, starting in classical Greek and Roman times, is constituted mainly by the history of Christian belief and, in more recent centuries, by secularist-humanist derivatives of medieval church teaching. Thought patterns born long ago in the West, Berry contends, underlie our current worldwide age of industrial, scientific, technological striving. It is that striving that is now destroying the earth.

"Patriarchal" vs. "Matricentric"

Chapter 12, "Patriarchy: A New Interpretation of History," is an indictment of a particularly virulent thought pattern that began in Old Europe some 5,000 years ago. Today that thought pattern has been labeled "patriarchy."

The word "patriarchy," according to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, refers to "social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly: control by men of a disproportionately large share of power."

I'm admittedly guessing about some of this, but apparently Berry is placing the start of the patriarchal period in Europe at roughly the beginning of the Later Neolithic age ... if not slightly before. In this essay, he gives not one but two dates for the onset of patriarchal culture in Europe: 3500 B.C. and 4500 B.C. According to Wikipedia's article on the Neolithic Age, that age ended in Europe in about 3000 B.C. Specifically, the Later Neolithic period in Europe ran from 3500 to 3000 B.C.

The arrival of patriarchal culture in Europe coincided, Berry says, with the arrival of conquering tribes that imposed control over Europe's settled agrarian cultures. The conquerors' society was nomadic and patriarchal. On the other hand, the settled agricultural denizens of Old Europe — the folk whom the invading tribes conquered, that is — had a matriarchal social organization. We know this because archaeologists find that their primary deities were female. They were goddesses, not gods. Accordingly, we can confidently call the pre-patriarchy age in the numerous agrarian locales of Europe "matriarchal" or "matricentric."

Berry says patriarchy was long associated with cities/civilizations such as Rome, while matriarchy was found mainly in rural areas.

Matricentric Culture

The matricentric cultures of Old Neolithic Europe were egalitarian, democratic, and peaceful. According to Judy Chicago, a feminist archaeologist whom Berry cites, the "female-oriented agricultural societies gradually gave way to a male-dominated political state in which occupational specialization, commerce, social stratification, and militarism developed" (p. 143).

Sound familiar? Our society today extols three of those four values — the exception being social stratification, as we are ostensibly more egalitarian and democratic. (Yet in terms of income stratification and wealth stratification, it seems we may have little to brag about.)

Patriarchy and Dominion

Not only were occupational specialization, commerce, social stratification, and militarism four of the primary motifs associated with early patricentric cultures. At a more basic level, the male drive toward conquest and dominion was (and remains) deeply characteristic of patriarchy.

The ecofeminist rap against our patriarchal culture is (in part) that patricentric conquest and dominion of the earth has left us playing out a currently unsustainable pattern of behavior. In the name of exercising control over Mother Nature, we are turning the abundance of natural resources of our planet into an overabundance of trash, waste, and toxicity.

Matricentric Attitudes Yet Endure

Berry's position on such matters is that we need to move from our present "patricentric" view to a new, "omnicentric" one that will put neither gender above the other. Our new ecological age will, however, draw much inspiration from the matricentric attitudes of Old Europe. These matricentric attitudes, it turns out, have been preserved right through the last five patriarchal millennia by virtue of an ineradicable substratum of belief and practice. Berry writes:

Even in this period of patriarchal dominance the heritage of the earlier matricentric phase has continued as an undercurrent within Western cultural traditions. Matricentric ways of thinking and their associated rituals 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 [the teachings of a magical and religious movement stemming from the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus]. These hidden traditions, considered destructive and unacceptable within the religious-humanist traditions of [today's] Western society, need reconsideration for the contributions they make to our understanding of the universe, its deeper modes of functioning, and the proper role of the human. The carry some of the most creative aspects of our civilization. In their symbolic modes of expression, especially, they enable us to go beyond the rational processes derivative from the classical philosophers and [also from] our later theologies. Through these traditions we have [for instance] recovered our understanding of the archetypal world of the unconscious. (p. 145)

Archetypes of the Unconscious

The "archetypal world of the unconscious"? What is that?

Unconscious archetypes, according to the early-twentieth-century psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (pronounced "YOONG"), generate universal symbols that are used in myths and heroic narratives across all cultures. We each natively carry all of these universal archetypes in our bodies and brains, though they remain unconscious until they are brought up to conscious awareness.

The process of bringing archetypal wisdom up to the level of conscious awareness can lead to "self-realization" — which in a male of the species involves actualizing the universal archetype of the feminine(!) that lurks buried within every man's psyche.

Ecofeminism Depicted

Archetypes, if they have not yet been lifted to the level of consciousness, typically express themselves as (often cryptic) symbols in dreams, myths, and works of art.

The image at left is not all that cryptic. It unites the deep archetypal idea of the feminine with the deep archetypal idea of the natural world.

It accordingly makes a fine icon for Ecofeminism.

What is Ecofeminism?

Endorsed by Berry in his book, Ecofeminism is a movement that sees ...

* * *

Whoa!

After starting that last sentence, I got called away and never finished it. Then commenced a string of problems that cropped up and kept me from getting back to writing this post for several days.

When I resumed, I ran into another problem: I could not find a short, pithy quote from Berry's "Patriarchy" chapter that would complete the sentence for me. Berry manages to convey what Ecofeminism is obliquely, by hinting at what life in the settled agricultural communities of Old Europe may have been like, before the conquest by the patriarchal peoples who brought with them their male deities. Ecofeminism is accordingly a movement that would unite the goals of today's ordinary feminism with those of the ecology movement by hearkening back to the values cherished in the matricentric days of over 5,000 years ago.

The Later History of Patriarchy

Admittedly, Berry's "Patriarchy" chapter frightened me. In it, Berry shows how a male-centered, patriarchal outlook has typified our culture since the days of the earliest true cities in Egypt and Sumeria. Those quasi-empires were succeeded by the true civilizations of Mesopotamia, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome ... all of which had rulers that were either male deities themselves or the anointed agents of the chief male gods.

As such, their authority was written in the stars. The whole cosmic order that undergirded natural phenomena bespoke their unrivaled status. One thinks of the sign of the Messiah's birth given by the Star of Bethlehem, or that by which the Once and Future King, Arthur, was identified, when only he could pull the sword Excalibur from the stone imprisoning it.

That much I could swallow. I could also handle it when I read how, according to Berry, patriarchy instilled its values into our ecclesiastical establishment from its earliest days on, and in our nation-states when they came into existence in more recent centuries.

Patriarchy and the Modern Corporation

When Berry starts talking of how those same masculine tendencies towards rapacity and conquest characterize our modern corporations, which he says are the primary agents responsible for plundering our environment today, I start to squirm. It's not that I don't see his point. Rather, it's that I do see his point, and I don't like it very much.

I would have to be stupid or blind not to see that my whole lifestyle depends on our major corporations. I would not be typing this blog post into my computer, for instance, were it not for the providence of Apple, Inc. I look out my window at my car, parked in front of my house, and see a product of the British Mini Cooper company, a corporation that is owned by BMW in Germany. My breakfast cereal was made by General Mills, or Post, or Nabisco. The list goes on and on.

If corporations are rapacious (and they are) and if their rapacity is a reflection of the patriarchal outlook that began 5,000 years ago (which it is), then my whole worldview is wrong, wrong, wrong. The entire pattern of my life is pathologically skewed. That's scary.

A Bitter Pill To Swallow

Berry goes on to state:

What is needed is a profound alteration of the pattern, not some modification of the pattern. To achieve this the basic principle of every significant revolution needs to be asserted: rejection of partial solutions. The tension of the existing situation must even be deliberately intensified so that the root cause of the destructive situation may become evident, for only when the cause becomes painfully clear will decisive change take place. The pain to be endured from the change must be experienced as a lesser pain to that of continuing the present course.

These four patriarchal establishments [empire, church, nation-state, corporation] have made a world that carries with it a certain pathos. Assuredly there is grandeur in many of its achievements. Enormous energies have been expended in what has been thought to be beneficial to the larger human process. To realize suddenly that so much of this has been misdirected, alienating, and destructive beyond anything previously known in human history is a bitter moment indeed. ... 

None of the other revolutionary movements in Western civilization has prepared us for what we must now confront. ... It is possibly the most complete reversal of values that has taken place since the Neolithic period (pp. 158 - 159)

Oh, woe and dread. Then Berry goes on:

The revelatory experience and the classical humanism on which our civilization has been founded — these are under challenge. Presently they are being severely criticized as manifestations of a biased mentality and as the context, if not the cause, of the universal devastation of the earth that is now taking place. (p. 159)

Need for a New Dream Vision

In his later chapter "The Dream of the Earth: Our Way into the Future," Berry identifies all the major thrusts of human cultural development with "dream visions" and "revelatory experiences" of the type associated in tribal societies with shamans. The biggest things we humans generate come out of intuitive, extra-rational visions, not out of reason or philosophy. No matter what our reason tells us after the fact, we are ever in the grip of an original myth.

That in itself is not bad, for our myths and revelatory visions derive from our "genetic coding." Our genes create the archetypes which express themselves as symbols in our sleeping or waking dreams. Those dreams power our changing, evolving "transgenetic cultural coding" (p. 200), each historical version of which provides "the functioning norm of a human community."

All we make, first we dream.

And our genes are the product of the earth itself, in its never-ending evolutionary capacities ... which in turn are expressions of the evolutionary capacities of the entire universe in which we arise.

Revelatory Experiences as Pathological

That would seem to me to suggest that the "revelatory experiences" that power our civilizations would be reliably beneficial, not pathological. However, according to Berry our civilization has been founded on one that has paradoxically turned into the context or cause of "the universal devastation of the earth that is now taking place."

How that could happen is a mystery Berry does not truly address. I personally feel it has something to do with what the literary critic and biblical scholar Northrop Frye, in his books The Great Code and Words with Power, called "demonic parody." A demonic parody, according to Frye, is an expression of what Berry would call a true "revelatory experience," but one which twists the original mythic motif in such a way that it becomes ugly and harmful rather than helpful and beautiful.

Prophecy and Dread

Yet that is but an intellectualization I use to avert my eyes from the dread which Berry's dire prophecy stirs in me. I simply don't want to confront the order of magnitude Berry says our revolutionary confrontation of patriarchal environmental atrocities must take on.

Which is surely why, after I wrote the beginning of my earlier unfinished sentence about the definition of Ecofeminism, I abruptly developed a lower back malady which prevented me for several days from sitting at my computer and trying to finish that sentence in an unthreatening, antiseptic way that I now see couldn't be done in the first place.

The material human body, in Berry's view, is wiser than the reasoning mind. The body imposes its own true nature on our plans and intentions. My body was telling me, "Stop! You are heading into dangerous territory. You are being called on to believe things that deep down you already realize are true ... but that you don't want to admit are true. You need to respond to that crisis of belief in a constructive, creative way that mere intellectualizations are designed to bypass. Think (and dream) some more before you try to finish that sentence!"

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!

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.